I like to joke that my gardening aesthetic is “witchy neglect.” I toss some plants in the ground and wait to see what grows. If it attracts bees, butterflies, or hummingbirds – and the wild bunnies don’t devour it – I plant more of it next year.

This spring, garden witchiness leveled up a bit, with the addition of Gord.

Let’s back up a bit.

Last October, Tech Support came home with a ghost pumpkin. He buys a pumpkin every October, despite the fact that:

we never have time to carve it
my efforts to cook things using pumpkin-not-from-a-can have never turned out well.

The pumpkin sat on the kitchen counter, and a week or so after Halloween, we named him Gord.*

You can’t eat a pumpkin once you’ve named him, so what do you do with him?

Obviously, you invite him to stay for Christmas (and at New Year’s, you give him a pointy hat). 

When February rolled around, we discovered that Gord was quite the romantic.

Shortly after St. Patrick’s Day, however, a couple of worrying brown spots appeared on Gord’s bumpy backside. And soon there were the first signs of mold… 

All of which meant that Gord couldn’t stay inside anymore. But by this time, he was practically a member of the family, and neither Tech Support nor I felt good about consigning him to the curb. So we put him in the garden instead.

The ice storm did him no favours, and Gord soon folded in on himself, beginning to resemble a donut more than a pumpkin. But that didn’t stop him from making a new friend: one of this spring’s crop of baby bunnies.

 

Shortly after the photo below was taken, Gord started attracting friends of the wriggly-insect variety, and we knew it was finally time to let him go. The only question was how to lift a semi-liquified gourd out of the garden without getting him all over ourselves. It took teamwork, a jumbo black garbage bag, and our experience pooper-scooping after family dogs, but we managed it. 

So long, Gord. Enjoy that big witchy garden in the sky.

 

Are you a gardener? How would you describe your own approach to making things grow?

 

 

*Get it? Gord the Gourd? Not the most sophisticated joke in the universe, I grant you, but it made me laugh.