My youngest loves pumpkins. He always has. When he was an infant, he had a pumpkin toy (he still has it) that would help calm him down and that he slept with every night. He is my little pumpkin.

Last year, for Halloween, we bought several pumpkins. We never ended up carving them into jack-o-lanterns. They sat in our living room, with other decorations, until I got tired of them (probably in late November, early December) and I put them larger ones that were left (as we had either cooked the smaller ones or given them to someone) and put them in our front flower bed in front of the front porch.

My husband kept saying he was going to move the pumpkins, maybe to the garden in the backyard, maybe in the front yard to the little plot under our crab apple tree. By the time he decided to actually do it this spring, the pumpkins were goo, and the seeds were beginning to sprout. I haven’t seen any pumpkins sprouting under the crab apple tree (where he threw what he could of the goo), but we do have several pumpkin plants growing in the front flower bed.

We can’t wait to see what happens with these vines.

We also planted three climbing rose bushes in the same bed (before the pumpkins began to grow) …and Mother Nature apparently seeded the entire bed with catnip, which we grow in pots on the front porch, to the joy of every single cat in the neighborhood–and our own cats as well.

So we are keeping a close eye on how everything is growing up together. we have already had to harvest and dry one big batch of catnip this spring…and it is nearly time for us to do it again because the plants are growing so fast, so high, so thick.

My son is loving it all. He has his own catnip plants in pots that we had to transplant from elsewhere in the front yard, not in a bed, but just growing out in the grass. We have a couple more of those sort that have sprouted up and we need to transplant.

This is our weird experiment for this year. Well, the youngest’s and mine. M husband’s earliest experiment was growing mesclun under the grow lights. It worked great until we forgot to harvest them before everything got too leggy, but it is an experiment we have no issues repeating.

What are you growing this year? Are you trying any experiments? A different type of plant that you don’t normally grow? Growing something in a place or in a way you don’t normally do it?

Let me know in the comments below.