pumpkin, potatoes and carrots

I thought I'd update on some of my veggies.  First the good news - my pumpkins are starting to look almost ripe.  You can tell they're ripe when the "stem dries out", or something like that.  And look!  One of my pumpkins is starting to look brown on the stem, sort of dried out and cracked. 


By comparison, this is what the other stems look like.  They've always been yellow, but bright and alive, not dull and brown.  Looks like I'll be harvesting soonish!







On a sadder note, I think my potatoes have carked it.  I thought they wilted from the heat wave, but unlike my other pot plants they didn't recover.  And as I mentioned earlier one of them quickly wilted and died - turns out that one had indeed rotted.  But now they both look like this.



To investigate I dug right down and pulled on of them out.  This is what the root looked like.  Not many roots at all, really, and still most of the seed potato attached.  No baby potatoes at all.  The soil was fairly damp too so my guess is that they're rotting from too much moisture.  I must have watered them too much in this heat - I must remember that these big pots hold in the moisture very well.  I've left one potato though ... I'm probably kidding myself but we'll see if it survives the week.

I also had to pull up my capsicum.  All of the fruit were rotting, it simply was not happy.  And when I did so I picked a few carrots to see how they were going.  This shows you the difference in growth based on how much sun they get.  I planted all of my carrots at the same time, but the small ones were in the shade of the capsicum.  That's all the green growth they had, and as you can see their roots didn't get very far.  The bigger one was in one of the sunnier spots, but still took a while to grow even that big, still only half the size of one from the supermarket.

They taste nice but not fantastically better than from the shops.  So I don't think I'll bother planting carrots again.  The soil's great for them - nice and sandy - but you can buy carrots all year round for really cheap.  Instead, I think I'll use that space for my sweet onions when I plant them in the autumn.  With only so much space available, I'd rather use it for something I can't get in the shops, or something that tastes much better than in the shops.