Thanks David. I had found some pumpkin seeds that my grandma had saved in a glass jar with an extremely tight lid. When I opened the jar I started to check them out to see if there was any life left in them. Nope, the handfull I checked were all flat, no sign of being viable. So I dumped them on the south side of my south facing porch hoping to add some tilth to the mostly clay soil. Well, I now have one pumpkin growing and has started putting out tendrils. Oh btw, my grandma passed in 1986. That's 37 years ago! I'm praying that it survives and gives me at least one pumpkin that my grandma thought was good enough to save the seeds. Much Love ❤
This is hilarious! “Don’t let the seeds hear!” One year, we had a very intentional garden with watermelons planted. It was a flop. No watermelons. But up by the porch, where we had spit watermelon seeds off the side the year before, we had a lush lovely watermelon crop grow right in the landscape bed. 😂
My Dad was born in 1902. He was a farmer in eastern washington. He told me many years ago they always grew pumpkins/winter squash around the compost pile. It kept the roots warm and they grew like crazy.
I had two peach trees in the compost pile! It only took them one year to start making peaches. And oh my, I made sure to get the first bite of one of those peaches. If heaven was a flavor, that's what I would have named those peaches!
I accidentally did the same thing. I have a whole book on composting by Barbara Pleasant, and she said to put a whole pumpkin at the bottom of a compost pile. I did that, and I have a huge area of healthy, beautiful pumpkins growing. Nature is amazing.
One fall I got really tired of picking cherry tomatoes. So I stopped. I left them on the vines and then left the vines on the ground. Come spring I cleaned the vines. Not long after I had an ARMY of baby cherry tomatoes. Way easier than planting in the house in January. Oh, this was in West Virginia.
The Seminole pumpkin seeds can stay dormant in the soil for years, I still have seeds germinating from compost put down four years ago. Every year we have a couple plants come up and go crazy without any fertilizer because it's a resting garden space . You have the cutest kids David! God has truly blessed you and the lady of the house 😊
Our best garden this year is where my husband rototilled our compost pile into a new section of our garden. We have tomatoes, squash, watermelon, beets, amaranth, Jerusalem artichokes and more growing a food forest. They are all so healthy! We just need to make our whole garden a compost pile and see what grows.
I am a horrible gardener. I fail every time I try to grow stuff. I love to make compost. I love it when something volunteers in my compost. This year it was small tomatoes. last year it was some small potatoes. The year before it was butternut squash. I love volunteers.
I am cracking up over here! Sometimes gardening can feel lonely to me but you totally described my experience with squash in general. I know I am not alone. "Follow the instructions on the packet" LOL. I usually find squash plants in my composting chicken bedding and I question the nitrogen burning roots thing. They seem to love it. Maybe next yr I will "drop some seeds" too. Would love an update to this video. Grateful for all your work and your sense of humor, which is literally the type conversations I have in the garden with myself....and the plants of course.
The compost pile is my best source for sweet potato slips. Every harvest we put the old vines on top of the compost pile and come back to thriving slips whenever we need them.
Same thing happened to me. I threw a pumpkin left over from halloween in the middle of my garden knowing I would till in the spring, And birds would get the dried seeds. Well they didn't get them all , I have a pumpkin patch now in the center of my garden. 😅
I swear, all the conundrums and ironies of my gardening experiences you cover so well and with great humor. I don't feel so defeated. I'll roll with it. Thanks again 😊
I worked at a large school once, with cement all around it. Well, a tomato plant decided to grow beside a sidewalk and it was prolific! No one bothered it out of respect!
I can confirm this message. Our pumpkins from last year (thrown all together in the backyard) grew like crazy in March - I transplanted them to a nice little field and they are now being picked-off one by one by squash vine borers. The pumpkins still growing in the compost pile are living their best lives.
With the news of pefa's found in our drinking water. I recently found out that the glossy surface on the cardboard has another form of Pefa (forever chemical) so i leave out any form of paper & cardboard now. I am going straight natural compost. If i seen it alive & die it's compost. yardwaste mostly. I question the produce from the store being sprayed. so only the veggies i grow get composted. Along with sagebrush, tree leaves, & alfalfa/hay i recently started growing as a living mulch for the sheep. I'll chop it all up put it in a bucket and soak it for about a day then spread it over where i want to compost in place. The indigenous worms appreciate the living mulch next to the compost. being so hot here in Arizona the moisture helps. Once its done i cover it with dry/wet grass about 2 inches thick. Can be left alone for about 3-4 days. Saves some water. Stay hydrated Grow Well Thank you Mr. GOOD. The seed you planted in our minds grows stronger every day
Definitely the best pumpkins and winter squashes come up on their own in compost or fertile areas. Got 21 butternut from 2 or 3 volunteers in a raised bed I dumped tons of chicken manure into. They overtook the other plants in there but who's complaining about 21 huge squashes...
Years ago, when I started making compost, I found a strange looking plant growing out of it. I figured that it was a weed and when I pulled it up, I found that it had grown from potato peelings. Growing up in the city, I had never seen a potato plant before, lol. Best potatoes I ever had. Clean too!
Around January I took a mostly rotten left over painted pumpkin and threw it in a deep indention a bulldozer made a couple years ago and grabbed some brown left over leaves from fall and Covered the pumpkin carcass and left it. I have my first ever pumpkins. In April I put about 6 scoops of compost on the six plants that came up. It's wondeful!❤ Thank you for all you do Sir.
My husband hates me planting things that run all over the yard. He can’t stand having to wait to mow, until the plants are done and the weeds get so high. (He’s terrified of snakes and keeps the lawns low). Determined to keep my Cherokee tan pumpkins and south Anna butternut squash, every year, I “accidentally”😇shhh, let some seeds fall into my compost pile.👍🏻 biggest cherokees I ever grew, accidentally of course
Come to think of it, my grama always added her kitchen scraps to her garden-making it her compost pile! She was from the WWII era where she worked in the jeep factories.
We had am opossum get into our watermelon and I hit another melon with a mower when I mowed down the dead Lima bean plants and mustard that had gone to seed. I left them for the wildlife. This past winter and spring, I scraped up the garden soil, added half rotted hay and manure from the livestock barn and filled 9 metal raised beds with it and mulched the top with half rotted leaves we got from the dump. Now I have a dozen or so of the best looking watermelons, plus Lima beans, cherry tomatoes, sunflowers and mustard greens scattered all over in those 9 metal beds, along with the actual tomatoes, carrots, basil , peppers, squash and potatoes that I planted. Lol Love healthy vigorous volunteer plants. 😂 The sunflowers and cherry tomatoes had been on the other side of the garden the past year, so I guess the birds planted them for me.
Love it! They are always listening and growing where they want to grow. I always try to tell them where they "should" grow but they ignore me. Same thing was happening when I was growing up in Puerto Rico. There, it was three species. Calabaza, Passion Fruits and Papaya. I could not get them where I needed them. They always conspired (together!) to take over my compost piles!!! 😂
Covered worm bins too! I put potato peels in there one time & to my utter astonishment, dozens of microscopically-thin bits of peel sprouted into vigorous little plants. Had no idea that was even possible.
@@56243Glegit. I pulled three random squash seedlings out of one and planted them, and now they're gargantuan plants. Hope I can get some fruit off of them and figure out what they are.
Growing up, my Dad use to throw every pit, seed and core into your garden to break down over the winter. We ended with volunteers of just about every fruit and vegetable we ate, except watermelon and pumpkin. The volunteer tomatoes were the sweetest and juiciest of all the tomatoes we had.
Thanks for the laugh David, since those seem to be in short supply these days. It sounded like the pigs were laughing in the background too! The best tomato plants I've ever grown have always come from the compost pile! :)
😊after seeing one of ur older videos doing something similar-i recently put our old moving boxes down in a row- put a layer of leaves and branches- then i piled on our kitchen scraps that were actually frozen cause i had no where else to store them- and to cover the scraps i used some muddy muck from our pond on top, i have pumpkins peppers tomatoes and watermelon all growing very well- i just bought some of your daughters tobacco and everglades tomato seeds that i hope to add to this style of gardening once they can be transplanted 😊
Hehe nice vid:] I have had a pumpkin start from the last years pumpkin that did not get carved. It took over my entire garden and gave me 6 pumpkins 3 very large ones. This is natures way of planting the fruit rots with all the necessary nutrients providing the best possible start. Apples cantaloupe and most fruits behave the same and we can simply not match this natural setup. Do not tell your pumpkins about this and it will work out great!
The junk yards when I was a kid, grew pumpkins everywhere. People throwing them in the garbage, or at the dump.. millions I’m sure are all over trash yards, waist yards 😊
The most fun thing we ever got from the previous year's pig yard was some gnarly squash things. Those were amazing, despite their appearance. "It might not look good, but it might BE good" in the immortal words of my husband's cousin, hee hee
Had a pumpkin volunteer out of some less-than-half finished compost i used as a mulch around my baby fruit trees. it was spaced pretty well, so remembering your talk about growing annuals under your fruit trees, I let it be. it's now massive and trying to escape into my yard and through then neighbor's fence (but the fruit trees are fine and probably appreciate the cooler microclimate from the pumpkin leaves) I did your melon pit method with another patch, but on top of the slop i put chopped up half-rotted fall decor pumpkins, goop and seeds and all, then covered that with native soil and planted into it and those are some VIGOROUS bastards. I said to myself when i did it "what has all the material a plant needs to grow a pumpkin but a pumpkin?" Maybe I was on to something there.
I have one of those black plastic compost bins from the city that has never done very well at actually composting, so this last winter and spring I started to just dig holes and bury buckets of kitchen scraps. I don't even know how many potato and squash plants have come up. I'm hopeful for a nice harvest
I watched your video a while back about digging holes and filling the holes with ash, bones, compost, chicken manure, etc. I tried it this year and I’m loving the results. Pumpkins are my favorite plant to grow, not because they are my favorite food to eat, but because they are so incredibly beautiful. I love this method and will do it again and again. I did not plant the seeds into mounds. Just let them do what they want. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Thanks for your videos.
My gardens are like that this year due to the anaerobic Bokashi compost I've been making from my fruit and veg and some paper and coffee ground wastes which after 2+ weeks of fermentation, I've been mixing with soil and adding into the garden. Turns out the fermentation process just boosts the germination likelihood of seeds in the food waste buckets like crazy! I've gotten zucchini for the first time this year due to volunteer plants that I let grow from that compost. I must have pulled out dozens if not hundreds of other seedlings so far. I could have fed the whole neighborhood If I'd let them all grow- no exaggeration!
I was trying to start pear seeds including cold stratification and nothing happened. Then this spring I found 4 perfectly healthy pear seedlings in my compost bin. I throw stuff in there and check for seedlings I might want all the time now!
Yes, I have not planted Seminole Pumpkins in 3 years, but I have 1 or 2 volunteer plants taking over my garden and making green bowling balls in the rows, walkways and on the tomato cages and heading for the neighbors yard. Not planted for three years, It is amazing! I am blessed!
Greatest butternut production came out of a shaded compost pile. It grew onto our lawn and I threatened my hubby to not cut the grass near it- late season bonus!
This happened to us too! We had eaten a wonderful tasting muskmelon. Threw scraps & all in the compost pile. Forgot about it for months. UNTIL this long vine kept growing & flowering. I used supports to keep it off the ground. Didn't want the nite time critters to eat my mystery vine. Those muskmelons were the best tasting surprise. Grew basketball size pumpkins a few years later. 😊 Luv those mystery surprises!
That's awesome. We bought a farm that had livestock stalls still full of waste and planted right in the pile and they're going all over the place! We'd never have gotten here without inspiration from you man.
The zuccchini I allowed to turn into a zeppelin for seed must have still had a seed in it. I had the healthiest, biggest, most productive plant last summer right in the centre of the compost pile. I kept adding compost, it wasn’t bothered.
So I did exactly both😂 with Acorn squash ( in the compost) and spread Spaghetti Sqaush & Butternut squash in bed and around the yard… well the ones I planted let snail say I pulled a many squash bugs off of and the rest have squash on them😂😂😂 I would have to agree David just “make a compost pile right here with some pumpkin seeds just happening to be in it😮😮😮😮”
Oh my goodness David you should see how three plants have completely taken over the backyard, the garden and climbing into the chickens run. Of course the chickens are keeping that one pruned pretty good. I see pumpkins all over the place, if nothing happens it's going to be a good Seminole year. I sent you some photos a couple years ago of my open pollinated Seminoles and they are larger than the original. I'm crossing them with Cherokee tan, hopefully get the best of both.
What a hoot! I have an accidental pumpkin plant in a tomato bed that I had set up using my homemade compost. It is definitely the most vigorous plant in my otherwise intentional garden. I am going to continue to ignore it for best results… 🎃
About a decade ago I had a volunteer vine that produced a tall, skinny, hard-shelled squash/pumpkin thing. Now I wish I had saved seed and kept growing it. I might have some kind of invincible landrace super survival squash.
Thanks again, David...for a good laugh, and good advice. I have come to the conclusion with pumpkin-planting that The Mound should Be Compost! If we just ensure that there are definitely pumpkin seeds in the mix, we should get brilliant, strong, fruitful and early pumpkins. My best tomato plants came up in compost... the plants lasted 2 years, fruited well each summer, and survived medium frosts! Sometimes l think we can be just a bit tooo careful! 😊👍God bless!
In the pile of leaves stripped bare from sea grapes, plumbagos,moringas, katuks , and who knows what else was left after cleanup from Hurricane Ian I had a single Everglades tomato come up - literally hundreds and hundreds of the sweetest, tomato-est tomatoes ever. I'm going back to the chop & drop trimming, well chop and drop where I want it, and will accidentally drop some Seminole pumpkin seeds in about a month so they will be growing during our season here in SW FL. Thanks for info and the delightful planting video. Do your kids ever get tired of your Dad silliness? We don't 😄
Many of my healthiest and most productive plants in my garden are from compost spread on the veg beds. Heck anything that survives the winter and wants to grow, I'm happy to let them.
Haha, this sounds like our garden. Every year we get radishes and lettuce and squash and tomatoes and tomatillos and yard long beans that spring up volunteer - so we let them grow. Last year I got a truly remarkable sunset-colored volunteer tomato that was super delicious. I saved seeds and planted them - we'll see what this year's harvest brings.
I'm in central VA, and he ONLY place that I have pumpkins growing this year is from my compost pile...completely unexpected and it's like they are on a mission, too! Along with the random tomato and potatoes. Compost pile for the win!
I love this, it's so true!! I have "tried" really hard sometimes to germinate things, and then the next year there it is. I accidently grew potatoes in the compost when someone helped me and didn't dig them in deep enough. This year I moved my compost area and realized it was the perfect place to try my first year of large pumpkins. I will take your tip and make sure they don't hear about my plans, ty! I can do relate to this, mother nature has a mind of her own.
I have papayas, mango, peaches, various citrus trees and avocados volunteer out of my compost and from visiting birds (papayas). I don't know how many pounds of papayas ive gotten after not planting the first seed, but ending up with 6 trees.
This is my second year with a garden and lo and behold I have something growing in my compost pile! Looks like a pumpkin or a butternut squash vine. My money is on pumpkin though... 😂 I think I threw an old pumpkin on the pile last year.
Land racing plants, using pigs as bulldozers and building compost piles...love it. I think your pigs want another cameo appearance. Shhhh! No more talking about pumpkins.😂 😃🌱🐢
{announcer voice ON:}: From the studio that brought you "Compost your Enemies" and "Bafeemus" comes: It Came From Over There! {announcer voice OFF} Our best squash comes from random places in the yard. We dumped some compost in the new GRG as we built it in the spring, and low and behold, two unknown squash are growing in the middle of the corn rows. I guess I should accidently throw some beans in there, too. And, I love the fact your pigs became the Greek Chorus to your Seed Accident. Some Pig!
I also think the volunteers that come up even in my garden from the previous year do better than the ones I plant….these aren’t in a compost pile, but I believe the volunteers must be hardier stock because they survived the winter without any protection and seem to be more productive than the ones I planted in the same environment
I have reacued avocado trees out of my compost pile in Oregon as well as a beautiful horseradish plant. Those are the most memorable but there have been many other thriving plants too.
Some volunteer tomatoes came up in the middle of the compost pile that was mostly from our bucket toilet. Some of the best tomatoes I have ever eaten. And the sweetest mustard greens I've ever eaten were picked from the middle of a trash pile behind an old farmer friend's house. The old farmer has passed, but I'd bet there are still sweet mustard greens coming up in that trash pile.
I have noticed that in my garden, when I put a load of compost from my compost bin into a bucket or planter loads of tomato plants start to grow from it. The toms that grow from these plants are really sweet and taste amazing.
Compost pile is where my pumpkins are!! Just found the cucumber growing there too late as I found five big yellow cucumbers. There is a melon of some type taking over my green beans. Yes, my garden has gone WILD!!!!
I just planted some Cherokee tans and Seminole pumpkins today. I made melon pits for them. I planted a few other ones a couple days ago and used the melon pit on them too. Planted black eye peas where I dug potatoes a few weeks ago.
I feel this! The first year I gardens here at my current location, my most successful crop was acorn squash that I had relocated from the compost pile. And yet right now as we speak I have some nice dirt with a sign sticking out of it identifying it as the type of pumpkin I grew successfully last year. Same seed packet, only 1 year old (small garden, don't use much). Nice looking dirt. 🙄
Two years ago I left a pumpkin in the garden to rot and the next year I had about 20 sprout up. I let them do their thing. They produced two healthy plants. I think we got 3 pumpkins. I've found that certain plants prefer utter neglect.
The butternut squash plants that are spilling out over our cement block walled compost pile are a gorgeous dark green with no sign of stress from 90° temps nor from typical pests. The plants I planted in meticulously prepared soil are not looking so good. It's as if the plants are laughing at me.
Yes! We just bought our new place this January. It came with a pumpkin! Lol at first I didn’t know what it was cause it was growing under our porch. It started peaking out under the first step, well let’s say I watched this regular size leaf grow in a matter of days! So obviously I had to look it up haha. I think some kids threw a bunch of pumpkin seeds before winter cause I saw a bunch during spring cleaning. Then it made sense
yep the compost pile always grows the best food even melons pumpkins, tomatoes and potatoes from the skins and eyes left on them. and they grow so much faster and for some reason the pests shy away from them too so they are healthier to boot. lol... i have some spaghetti squash and cantaloupe growing in mine right now along with potatoes they seem happy so we just keep dumping more compostable stuff in the box with them they are happier then my my small garden i planted that's not doing a damn thing, the plants came up nicely now they are either dead or so small nothing is being produced. and they got water and compost and natural fertilizer. But i have learned that from the past where i got apple trees and my daughter gave me plum tree's that grew in her compost pile. so we really like just dumping the kitchen waste where ever we don't mind things growing on their own. my apples are small it's the second year for fruit so i don't know how they will turn out. even if the apple isn't good the wood will become smoking chips or chop and drop compost or shade tree. no matter how you look at it, it's useful one way or another. Thanks for sharing your experience with this happy easy way of gardening too. those pumpkins look amazing. i hope your new compost pile makes more for you.
😂 we have a mound of manure, and we ended up with pumpkins, squash, gourds, that we never recalled having on the property. It was awesome. We started adding melons and sunflowers. It was incredible.
We are growing some saved seed from last year's pumpkins that grew out of our compost pile. For many years we let the pumpkins take over the compost pile. We called her "Margery" in honor of the living compost pile of Fragile Rock. Only problem each year was we didn't get to use some of the compost that Margery was growing in for the real garden. This year I made a Margery pumpkin mini compost pile on purpose outside of our big garden compost pile so we can use all of the compost for the garden we made. I also grow tater peelings out of the compost pile. During the early spring I bury any potato peelings that we have shallow in the pile. Any that sprout up, I dig up and transplant to the tater patch. I have probably a dozen or so growing now. They are big enough to flower and will soon set their poison potato fruit. Last year I harvested around 30 pounds of taters that grew from peelings. BTW - We compost just about everything; fruit, veggies, weeds, leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, sour milk, fuzzy cheese, rotten eggs, meat trimmings, oil/butter, and whole chickens when they pass from our layers and the chicken coop deep bedding that gets mucked out twice a year.
So that's how you do it! I planted Seminole pumpkins this year, the vines were nice and green and now they are dead, riddled with some kind of bug bites, and not a flower or pumpkin to be had. I think I'll head to the compost pile. Thanks, David!
My butternut squash, potatoes, and tomatoes have taken over my compost pile…..all volunteers….they are crowded and fighting for space, but are doing way better than my deliberate plantings of the same in my row gardens
The chicken run here is a magical place. The most beautiful little yellow matoes and catnip. Never planted either there. Beginning to just let volunteers stay where they showvup. Kinda Rurh Stoutish? Luffa and watermelon do their own thing in the garden. Going to relocte one watermelon growing in the walkway. Now if the "easy to grow" calendula could overwinter for once.
:) this last summer we ended up with a cross between white pumpkins and spaghetti squash. they were fun (what the compost pile produces is always a fun surprise). the flavor was a bit mild, but it was spectacular in some dishes because of that, it meddled well with other flavors instead of taking over. we left one behind through the winter (I had fun smashing it the other day)- we'll see what we get this year.
i put avocado pits in the compost - i have. avocado trees growing - i just don't know what variety - fuerte, bacon, haas - the guess will be when they get replanted and 8+ years later get fruit .....same with pecans - have few sported that stayed under the tree and got buried in leaves, rocks, dirt ....
Thanks David. I had found some pumpkin seeds that my grandma had saved in a glass jar with an extremely tight lid. When I opened the jar I started to check them out to see if there was any life left in them. Nope, the handfull I checked were all flat, no sign of being viable. So I dumped them on the south side of my south facing porch hoping to add some tilth to the mostly clay soil. Well, I now have one pumpkin growing and has started putting out tendrils. Oh btw, my grandma passed in 1986. That's 37 years ago! I'm praying that it survives and gives me at least one pumpkin that my grandma thought was good enough to save the seeds. Much Love ❤
Wow
@@smartviewer2004 Thank You. I will ❤
This is so awesome!! You can harvest the new seeds and keep growing them year after year!! ❤❤
@@athomewithjenny Yes, save those seeds!
@@athomewithjenny That was my thought too.❤
This is hilarious! “Don’t let the seeds hear!”
One year, we had a very intentional garden with watermelons planted. It was a flop. No watermelons. But up by the porch, where we had spit watermelon seeds off the side the year before, we had a lush lovely watermelon crop grow right in the landscape bed. 😂
My Dad was born in 1902. He was a farmer in eastern washington. He told me many years ago they always grew pumpkins/winter squash around the compost pile. It kept the roots warm and they grew like crazy.
Great tip 👍
I had two peach trees in the compost pile! It only took them one year to start making peaches. And oh my, I made sure to get the first bite of one of those peaches. If heaven was a flavor, that's what I would have named those peaches!
@KittyMama61 WOW really?! Awesome!!!!
I accidentally did the same thing. I have a whole book on composting by Barbara Pleasant, and she said to put a whole pumpkin at the bottom of a compost pile. I did that, and I have a huge area of healthy, beautiful pumpkins growing. Nature is amazing.
We get all sorts of stuff growing out of the compost pile - squash, cukes, beans, potatoes. Sometimes they do better than what we plant deliberately.
Left an entire bed with just compost and only added heavy hitter okra and have tons of misc stuff lol
One fall I got really tired of picking cherry tomatoes. So I stopped. I left them on the vines and then left the vines on the ground. Come spring I cleaned the vines. Not long after I had an ARMY of baby cherry tomatoes. Way easier than planting in the house in January. Oh, this was in West Virginia.
The Seminole pumpkin seeds can stay dormant in the soil for years, I still have seeds germinating from compost put down four years ago. Every year we have a couple plants come up and go crazy without any fertilizer because it's a resting garden space .
You have the cutest kids David! God has truly blessed you and the lady of the house 😊
Our best garden this year is where my husband rototilled our compost pile into a new section of our garden. We have tomatoes, squash, watermelon, beets, amaranth, Jerusalem artichokes and more growing a food forest. They are all so healthy! We just need to make our whole garden a compost pile and see what grows.
Sounds like a great start to food forest... happy harvesting!!
@@Katydidit Thanks!
I am a horrible gardener. I fail every time I try to grow stuff. I love to make compost. I love it when something volunteers in my compost. This year it was small tomatoes. last year it was some small potatoes. The year before it was butternut squash. I love volunteers.
I am cracking up over here! Sometimes gardening can feel lonely to me but you totally described my experience with squash in general. I know I am not alone. "Follow the instructions on the packet" LOL. I usually find squash plants in my composting chicken bedding and I question the nitrogen burning roots thing. They seem to love it. Maybe next yr I will "drop some seeds" too. Would love an update to this video. Grateful for all your work and your sense of humor, which is literally the type conversations I have in the garden with myself....and the plants of course.
The compost pile is my best source for sweet potato slips. Every harvest we put the old vines on top of the compost pile and come back to thriving slips whenever we need them.
Same thing happened to me.
I threw a pumpkin left over from halloween in the middle of my garden knowing I would till in the spring,
And birds would get the dried seeds.
Well they didn't get them all , I have a pumpkin patch now in the center of my garden. 😅
I swear, all the conundrums and ironies of my gardening experiences you cover so well and with great humor. I don't feel so defeated. I'll roll with it.
Thanks again 😊
I worked at a large school once, with cement all around it. Well, a tomato plant decided to grow beside a sidewalk and it was prolific! No one bothered it out of respect!
😂
I can confirm this message. Our pumpkins from last year (thrown all together in the backyard) grew like crazy in March - I transplanted them to a nice little field and they are now being picked-off one by one by squash vine borers. The pumpkins still growing in the compost pile are living their best lives.
That is so interesting!
With the news of pefa's found in our drinking water. I recently found out that the glossy surface on the cardboard has another form of Pefa (forever chemical) so i leave out any form of paper & cardboard now. I am going straight natural compost. If i seen it alive & die it's compost. yardwaste mostly. I question the produce from the store being sprayed. so only the veggies i grow get composted. Along with sagebrush, tree leaves, & alfalfa/hay i recently started growing as a living mulch for the sheep. I'll chop it all up put it in a bucket and soak it for about a day then spread it over where i want to compost in place. The indigenous worms appreciate the living mulch next to the compost. being so hot here in Arizona the moisture helps. Once its done i cover it with dry/wet grass about 2 inches thick. Can be left alone for about 3-4 days. Saves some water. Stay hydrated Grow Well Thank you Mr. GOOD. The seed you planted in our minds grows stronger every day
Definitely the best pumpkins and winter squashes come up on their own in compost or fertile areas. Got 21 butternut from 2 or 3 volunteers in a raised bed I dumped tons of chicken manure into. They overtook the other plants in there but who's complaining about 21 huge squashes...
Years ago, when I started making compost, I found a strange looking plant growing out of it. I figured that it was a weed and when I pulled it up, I found that it had grown from potato peelings. Growing up in the city, I had never seen a potato plant before, lol. Best potatoes I ever had. Clean too!
Around January I took a mostly rotten left over painted pumpkin and threw it in a deep indention a bulldozer made a couple years ago and grabbed some brown left over leaves from fall and Covered the pumpkin carcass and left it. I have my first ever pumpkins. In April I put about 6 scoops of compost on the six plants that came up. It's wondeful!❤
Thank you for all you do Sir.
My husband hates me planting things that run all over the yard. He can’t stand having to wait to mow, until the plants are done and the weeds get so high. (He’s terrified of snakes and keeps the lawns low). Determined to keep my Cherokee tan pumpkins and south Anna butternut squash, every year, I “accidentally”😇shhh, let some seeds fall into my compost pile.👍🏻 biggest cherokees I ever grew, accidentally of course
Come to think of it, my grama always added her kitchen scraps to her garden-making it her compost pile! She was from the WWII era where she worked in the jeep factories.
*some sketchy gardening news site*
“In just 5 minutes a week, this simple trick will make your pumpkins huge. Farmers hate this man.”
It always cracks me up how this happens. I'm going to try the same thing with watermelons.
We had am opossum get into our watermelon and I hit another melon with a mower when I mowed down the dead Lima bean plants and mustard that had gone to seed. I left them for the wildlife. This past winter and spring, I scraped up the garden soil, added half rotted hay and manure from the livestock barn and filled 9 metal raised beds with it and mulched the top with half rotted leaves we got from the dump. Now I have a dozen or so of the best looking watermelons, plus Lima beans, cherry tomatoes, sunflowers and mustard greens scattered all over in those 9 metal beds, along with the actual tomatoes, carrots, basil , peppers, squash and potatoes that I planted. Lol Love healthy vigorous volunteer plants. 😂 The sunflowers and cherry tomatoes had been on the other side of the garden the past year, so I guess the birds planted them for me.
Love it! They are always listening and growing where they want to grow. I always try to tell them where they "should" grow but they ignore me.
Same thing was happening when I was growing up in Puerto Rico. There, it was three species. Calabaza, Passion Fruits and Papaya. I could not get them where I needed them. They always conspired (together!) to take over my compost piles!!! 😂
Covered worm bins too! I put potato peels in there one time & to my utter astonishment, dozens of microscopically-thin bits of peel sprouted into vigorous little plants. Had no idea that was even possible.
My worm bins always yield the best seedlings.
@@56243Glegit. I pulled three random squash seedlings out of one and planted them, and now they're gargantuan plants. Hope I can get some fruit off of them and figure out what they are.
Growing up, my Dad use to throw every pit, seed and core into your garden to break down over the winter. We ended with volunteers of just about every fruit and vegetable we ate, except watermelon and pumpkin. The volunteer tomatoes were the sweetest and juiciest of all the tomatoes we had.
And this is why you’re my favorite garden channel.
Thanks for the laugh David, since those seem to be in short supply these days. It sounded like the pigs were laughing in the background too! The best tomato plants I've ever grown have always come from the compost pile! :)
Me too! 😆😆😆
Happening now for me.
This is me and butternut squash. I doesn’t really grow where I want it but it started growing out of my old compost pile and is going nuts.
😊after seeing one of ur older videos doing something similar-i recently put our old moving boxes down in a row- put a layer of leaves and branches- then i piled on our kitchen scraps that were actually frozen cause i had no where else to store them- and to cover the scraps i used some muddy muck from our pond on top, i have pumpkins peppers tomatoes and watermelon all growing very well- i just bought some of your daughters tobacco and everglades tomato seeds that i hope to add to this style of gardening once they can be transplanted 😊
Hehe nice vid:] I have had a pumpkin start from the last years pumpkin that did not get carved. It took over my entire garden and gave me 6 pumpkins 3 very large ones. This is natures way of planting the fruit rots with all the necessary nutrients providing the best possible start. Apples cantaloupe and most fruits behave the same and we can simply not match this natural setup. Do not tell your pumpkins about this and it will work out great!
Love your crazy sense of humor. But I know what you mean. The plants seem to have a mind of their own
The junk yards when I was a kid, grew pumpkins everywhere. People throwing them in the garbage, or at the dump.. millions I’m sure are all over trash yards, waist yards 😊
I have a full blown bouquet of pumpkins blooming out of my compost bin. They are healthier than anything I seeded in my garden. It's crazy!
The most fun thing we ever got from the previous year's pig yard was some gnarly squash things. Those were amazing, despite their appearance. "It might not look good, but it might BE good" in the immortal words of my husband's cousin, hee hee
Had a pumpkin volunteer out of some less-than-half finished compost i used as a mulch around my baby fruit trees. it was spaced pretty well, so remembering your talk about growing annuals under your fruit trees, I let it be. it's now massive and trying to escape into my yard and through then neighbor's fence (but the fruit trees are fine and probably appreciate the cooler microclimate from the pumpkin leaves)
I did your melon pit method with another patch, but on top of the slop i put chopped up half-rotted fall decor pumpkins, goop and seeds and all, then covered that with native soil and planted into it and those are some VIGOROUS bastards. I said to myself when i did it "what has all the material a plant needs to grow a pumpkin but a pumpkin?" Maybe I was on to something there.
I have one of those black plastic compost bins from the city that has never done very well at actually composting, so this last winter and spring I started to just dig holes and bury buckets of kitchen scraps. I don't even know how many potato and squash plants have come up. I'm hopeful for a nice harvest
Exactly! I did the same and getting similar results. 😮
I get tomato plants growing every year from my compost pile 😆😆❤️ and yes, they grow amazingly well!!
I watched your video a while back about digging holes and filling the holes with ash, bones, compost, chicken manure, etc. I tried it this year and I’m loving the results. Pumpkins are my favorite plant to grow, not because they are my favorite food to eat, but because they are so incredibly beautiful. I love this method and will do it again and again. I did not plant the seeds into mounds. Just let them do what they want. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Thanks for your videos.
My gardens are like that this year due to the anaerobic Bokashi compost I've been making from my fruit and veg and some paper and coffee ground wastes which after 2+ weeks of fermentation, I've been mixing with soil and adding into the garden. Turns out the fermentation process just boosts the germination likelihood of seeds in the food waste buckets like crazy! I've gotten zucchini for the first time this year due to volunteer plants that I let grow from that compost. I must have pulled out dozens if not hundreds of other seedlings so far. I could have fed the whole neighborhood If I'd let them all grow- no exaggeration!
I was trying to start pear seeds including cold stratification and nothing happened. Then this spring I found 4 perfectly healthy pear seedlings in my compost bin. I throw stuff in there and check for seedlings I might want all the time now!
That is excellent. Great find.
Yes, I have not planted Seminole Pumpkins in 3 years, but I have 1 or 2 volunteer plants taking over my garden and making green bowling balls in the rows, walkways and on the tomato cages and heading for the neighbors yard. Not planted for three years, It is amazing! I am blessed!
Greatest butternut production came out of a shaded compost pile. It grew onto our lawn and I threatened my hubby to not cut the grass near it- late season bonus!
This happened to us too! We had eaten a wonderful tasting muskmelon. Threw scraps & all in the compost pile. Forgot about it for months. UNTIL this long vine kept growing & flowering. I used supports to keep it off the ground. Didn't want the nite time critters to eat my mystery vine. Those muskmelons were the best tasting surprise. Grew basketball size pumpkins a few years later. 😊 Luv those mystery surprises!
That's awesome. We bought a farm that had livestock stalls still full of waste and planted right in the pile and they're going all over the place! We'd never have gotten here without inspiration from you man.
The zuccchini I allowed to turn into a zeppelin for seed must have still had a seed in it. I had the healthiest, biggest, most productive plant last summer right in the centre of the compost pile. I kept adding compost, it wasn’t bothered.
You used the forbidden Z word.
And it was not zeppelin. 😂
Hilarious! But what an important lesson! The importance of a compost pile wins again!!
This happened to me, but with watermelons. I had a Carolina cross seed in there grow to 130 lb all on it's own
What a fun dad!!
This happened exactly with us at our home in KY. Pumpkins always grew from the compost pile u til I got a compost tumbler 😅
So I did exactly both😂 with Acorn squash ( in the compost) and spread Spaghetti Sqaush & Butternut squash in bed and around the yard… well the ones I planted let snail say I pulled a many squash bugs off of and the rest have squash on them😂😂😂 I would have to agree David just “make a compost pile right here with some pumpkin seeds just happening to be in it😮😮😮😮”
Oh my goodness David you should see how three plants have completely taken over the backyard, the garden and climbing into the chickens run. Of course the chickens are keeping that one pruned pretty good. I see pumpkins all over the place, if nothing happens it's going to be a good Seminole year. I sent you some photos a couple years ago of my open pollinated Seminoles and they are larger than the original. I'm crossing them with Cherokee tan, hopefully get the best of both.
What a hoot! I have an accidental pumpkin plant in a tomato bed that I had set up using my homemade compost. It is definitely the most vigorous plant in my otherwise intentional garden. I am going to continue to ignore it for best results… 🎃
About a decade ago I had a volunteer vine that produced a tall, skinny, hard-shelled squash/pumpkin thing. Now I wish I had saved seed and kept growing it. I might have some kind of invincible landrace super survival squash.
Thank you for sharing these pearls of wisdom!
I have pumpkins growing in my cattle/goat pasture where I threw some pumpkins in for them to eat last fall. They're doing great!
Thanks again, David...for a good laugh, and good advice. I have come to the conclusion with pumpkin-planting that The Mound should Be Compost! If we just ensure that there are definitely pumpkin seeds in the mix, we should get brilliant, strong, fruitful and early pumpkins. My best tomato plants came up in compost... the plants lasted 2 years, fruited well each summer, and survived medium frosts! Sometimes l think we can be just a bit tooo careful! 😊👍God bless!
So hilarious!! Please update if pumpkins grow!
It's raining right now, so hopefully that will get 'em started!
An accidental tip i discovered, let your lettuce go to seed and you won't need lettuce, seed or a ground cover crop ever again.
Compost pile is great for starting artichoke seeds
In the pile of leaves stripped bare from sea grapes, plumbagos,moringas, katuks , and who knows what else was left after cleanup from Hurricane Ian I had a single Everglades tomato come up - literally hundreds and hundreds of the sweetest, tomato-est tomatoes ever. I'm going back to the chop & drop trimming, well chop and drop where I want it, and will accidentally drop some Seminole pumpkin seeds in about a month so they will be growing during our season here in SW FL. Thanks for info and the delightful planting video. Do your kids ever get tired of your Dad silliness? We don't 😄
Many of my healthiest and most productive plants in my garden are from compost spread on the veg beds. Heck anything that survives the winter and wants to grow, I'm happy to let them.
Haha, this sounds like our garden. Every year we get radishes and lettuce and squash and tomatoes and tomatillos and yard long beans that spring up volunteer - so we let them grow. Last year I got a truly remarkable sunset-colored volunteer tomato that was super delicious. I saved seeds and planted them - we'll see what this year's harvest brings.
Here in the desert I got a pepper and purslane from compost. Have 1 okra and 1 bean grown on purpose.
I'm in central VA, and he ONLY place that I have pumpkins growing this year is from my compost pile...completely unexpected and it's like they are on a mission, too! Along with the random tomato and potatoes. Compost pile for the win!
I love this, it's so true!! I have "tried" really hard sometimes to germinate things, and then the next year there it is. I accidently grew potatoes in the compost when someone helped me and didn't dig them in deep enough. This year I moved my compost area and realized it was the perfect place to try my first year of large pumpkins. I will take your tip and make sure they don't hear about my plans, ty! I can do relate to this, mother nature has a mind of her own.
I have papayas, mango, peaches, various citrus trees and avocados volunteer out of my compost and from visiting birds (papayas). I don't know how many pounds of papayas ive gotten after not planting the first seed, but ending up with 6 trees.
What part of the world do you live in? Lots of interesting fruit trees that seem to enjoy warmer weather.
This is my second year with a garden and lo and behold I have something growing in my compost pile! Looks like a pumpkin or a butternut squash vine. My money is on pumpkin though... 😂 I think I threw an old pumpkin on the pile last year.
I know some plants like being attended to but you're right-on about having to be sneaky with others.
Compost pile full of nutrients, so pumpkins loves it
😅 yep! Everything grows better in the compost pile... and Annette I use to have my birds! Lots of volunteer tomatoes this year.
Land racing plants, using pigs as bulldozers and building compost piles...love it. I think your pigs want another cameo appearance. Shhhh! No more talking about pumpkins.😂
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You're just Adorable!!! Absolutely Adorable!
Great video
{announcer voice ON:}: From the studio that brought you "Compost your Enemies" and "Bafeemus" comes: It Came From Over There!
{announcer voice OFF}
Our best squash comes from random places in the yard. We dumped some compost in the new GRG as we built it in the spring, and low and behold, two unknown squash are growing in the middle of the corn rows. I guess I should accidently throw some beans in there, too.
And, I love the fact your pigs became the Greek Chorus to your Seed Accident. Some Pig!
I also think the volunteers that come up even in my garden from the previous year do better than the ones I plant….these aren’t in a compost pile, but I believe the volunteers must be hardier stock because they survived the winter without any protection and seem to be more productive than the ones I planted in the same environment
I thought the same thing too 👍🏻👍🏻
LOL that was great David! You are so right though. If I would just water my compost pile...there are squash and potatoes growing in it already.
I have reacued avocado trees out of my compost pile in Oregon as well as a beautiful horseradish plant. Those are the most memorable but there have been many other thriving plants too.
Some volunteer tomatoes came up in the middle of the compost pile that was mostly from our bucket toilet. Some of the best tomatoes I have ever eaten. And the sweetest mustard greens I've ever eaten were picked from the middle of a trash pile behind an old farmer friend's house. The old farmer has passed, but I'd bet there are still sweet mustard greens coming up in that trash pile.
I love the music you use at the end. I know it's one of your compositions. it's great. Oh, and I loved this funny video too. 😅
I get a lot of things grow out of my compost pile. I love the tomatoes it grows.
I have noticed that in my garden, when I put a load of compost from my compost bin into a bucket or planter loads of tomato plants start to grow from it. The toms that grow from these plants are really sweet and taste amazing.
Compost pile is where my pumpkins are!! Just found the cucumber growing there too late as I found five big yellow cucumbers. There is a melon of some type taking over my green beans. Yes, my garden has gone WILD!!!!
I just planted some Cherokee tans and Seminole pumpkins today. I made melon pits for them. I planted a few other ones a couple days ago and used the melon pit on them too. Planted black eye peas where I dug potatoes a few weeks ago.
I feel this!
The first year I gardens here at my current location, my most successful crop was acorn squash that I had relocated from the compost pile.
And yet right now as we speak I have some nice dirt with a sign sticking out of it identifying it as the type of pumpkin I grew successfully last year. Same seed packet, only 1 year old (small garden, don't use much). Nice looking dirt. 🙄
Two years ago I left a pumpkin in the garden to rot and the next year I had about 20 sprout up. I let them do their thing. They produced two healthy plants. I think we got 3 pumpkins. I've found that certain plants prefer utter neglect.
Hi David, I'm growing taters in my heap. Awesome growth. Love your channel.
The butternut squash plants that are spilling out over our cement block walled compost pile are a gorgeous dark green with no sign of stress from 90° temps nor from typical pests. The plants I planted in meticulously prepared soil are not looking so good. It's as if the plants are laughing at me.
Yes! We just bought our new place this January. It came with a pumpkin! Lol at first I didn’t know what it was cause it was growing under our porch. It started peaking out under the first step, well let’s say I watched this regular size leaf grow in a matter of days! So obviously I had to look it up haha. I think some kids threw a bunch of pumpkin seeds before winter cause I saw a bunch during spring cleaning. Then it made sense
yep the compost pile always grows the best food even melons pumpkins, tomatoes and potatoes from the skins and eyes left on them. and they grow so much faster and for some reason the pests shy away from them too so they are healthier to boot. lol... i have some spaghetti squash and cantaloupe growing in mine right now along with potatoes they seem happy so we just keep dumping more compostable stuff in the box with them they are happier then my my small garden i planted that's not doing a damn thing, the plants came up nicely now they are either dead or so small nothing is being produced. and they got water and compost and natural fertilizer. But i have learned that from the past where i got apple trees and my daughter gave me plum tree's that grew in her compost pile. so we really like just dumping the kitchen waste where ever we don't mind things growing on their own. my apples are small it's the second year for fruit so i don't know how they will turn out. even if the apple isn't good the wood will become smoking chips or chop and drop compost or shade tree. no matter how you look at it, it's useful one way or another. Thanks for sharing your experience with this happy easy way of gardening too. those pumpkins look amazing. i hope your new compost pile makes more for you.
😂 we have a mound of manure, and we ended up with pumpkins, squash, gourds, that we never recalled having on the property. It was awesome. We started adding melons and sunflowers. It was incredible.
Love your system, but I do tell all my plants that I did all a human can do. It's all up to them from this time in. Great channel, thanks
We are growing some saved seed from last year's pumpkins that grew out of our compost pile. For many years we let the pumpkins take over the compost pile. We called her "Margery" in honor of the living compost pile of Fragile Rock. Only problem each year was we didn't get to use some of the compost that Margery was growing in for the real garden. This year I made a Margery pumpkin mini compost pile on purpose outside of our big garden compost pile so we can use all of the compost for the garden we made.
I also grow tater peelings out of the compost pile. During the early spring I bury any potato peelings that we have shallow in the pile. Any that sprout up, I dig up and transplant to the tater patch. I have probably a dozen or so growing now. They are big enough to flower and will soon set their poison potato fruit. Last year I harvested around 30 pounds of taters that grew from peelings.
BTW - We compost just about everything; fruit, veggies, weeds, leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, sour milk, fuzzy cheese, rotten eggs, meat trimmings, oil/butter, and whole chickens when they pass from our layers and the chicken coop deep bedding that gets mucked out twice a year.
So that's how you do it! I planted Seminole pumpkins this year, the vines were nice and green and now they are dead, riddled with some kind of bug bites, and not a flower or pumpkin to be had. I think I'll head to the compost pile. Thanks, David!
My butternut squash, potatoes, and tomatoes have taken over my compost pile…..all volunteers….they are crowded and fighting for space, but are doing way better than my deliberate plantings of the same in my row gardens
The chicken run here is a magical place. The most beautiful little yellow matoes and catnip. Never planted either there. Beginning to just let volunteers stay where they showvup. Kinda Rurh Stoutish? Luffa and watermelon do their own thing in the garden. Going to relocte one watermelon growing in the walkway. Now if the "easy to grow" calendula could overwinter for once.
My calendula overwintered once. Trying again this year ❤
lol! Volunteers are always the best, whether you want them or not. 😆
:) this last summer we ended up with a cross between white pumpkins and spaghetti squash. they were fun (what the compost pile produces is always a fun surprise). the flavor was a bit mild, but it was spectacular in some dishes because of that, it meddled well with other flavors instead of taking over. we left one behind through the winter (I had fun smashing it the other day)- we'll see what we get this year.
My pumpkins love growing out of my leaf mulching pile, and I make sure to plant beans or peas with them.
i put avocado pits in the compost - i have. avocado trees growing - i just don't know what variety - fuerte, bacon, haas - the guess will be when they get replanted and 8+ years later get fruit .....same with pecans - have few sported that stayed under the tree and got buried in leaves, rocks, dirt ....
We compost in the garden bed over winter all the summer crops then plant pumpkin plants in it in the spring and they grow a treat