Peter's a pumpkin eater

MOST gardeners like to experiment with new, different or unusual types of plants.

I'm almost addicted to doing this.

I search catalogues for plants or seeds, or dedicated gardeners occasionally send me samples of seeds religiously saved by their families for generations.

Anyway, in October last year, I was looking at an area of ex-lawn, where I'd dug up the grass and worked the soil.

I was running out of time to plant it out and there was every chance it would become a neglected area full of weeds.

So I thought why not try out as many different types of pumpkins and winter squashes as I could fit in?

So I wandered through seed racks and studied the catalogues, then added a few seeds previously saved from outstanding croppers.

Then I went to work dumping bags of sheep manure in heaps all over the big bed.

Added to these were shovelfuls of pelletised chook manure, blood and bone, mushroom compost and at least one good fistful of sulphate of potash per heap.

Each pile of magnificent nutrient was dug in and thoroughly mixed deeply into the soil and watered heavily.

I even added diluted fish emulsion and seaweed concentrate and left everything to settle for a couple of days.

In went the seeds, four to every heap of nourishment.

The varieties included Austrian oilseed (lovely sweet flesh and amazingly hull-less seeds for roasting and delicious eating), blue hubbard winter squash, green hubbard, Long Island cheese (huge flattish, cheese-shaped pumpkins), pink banana jumbo, sugar pie and Thelma Sanders sweet potato (grapefruit-sized, superbly sweet, heavily ridged golden fruit).

And there was also table king acorn (small, pale-green fruit on small bushy plants) and of course the great, reliable long-keepers Queensland blue and sweet grey as safety precautions.

I've never seen growth like it.

The ex-lawn bed is now a sea of massive pumpkin and winter squash foliage.

Weeds have Buckley's hope of competing.

And everywhere are developing fruits of all sizes and every possible colour.

But I also made a gormless blunder.

After digging up a metre-wide strip of detested lawn, four metres long in early spring, I dashed out and foolishly bought a bundle of miserable-looking raspberry plants.

Against my better judgment I shoved them into the suitably enriched soil of the strip.

It's true we were denuded with massive rainfalls at the time and the ground remained cold and saturated for another three weeks.

And virtually nothing happened. The dead-looking sticks remained dead. Just one raspberry plant survived.

Desperately I dashed off and bought some absurdly expensive potted strawberry runners.

At least they were coming into flower, so they went in.

Then something strange happened.

A single pumpkin plant appeared among the new strawberry plants, well before all the others had been even started. And I'm always curious, because it definitely was not sown by me.

So I controlled myself and let the thing survive.

And boy did the bloomin' thing grow.

The runners started to stretch out across the adjoining grass. I've never seen so many early pumpkin flowers - a handful of silly-looking, almost useless males but countless fruit-bearing females.

The bees went berserk and soon the weirdest-looking pumpkins started to form and swell rapidly.

I recognised them of course, the old-fashioned Turkish turban.

They may have an odd shape, but they are marvellously delicious to eat.

And they keep well. Now from that one chance seedling I can count up to 30 Turkish turban pumpkins and the plant is still forming more.

I've pinched out all the ends of the runners, but the side-shoots are already carrying lots more female flowers.

Things are getting desperate in my veggie patch.

I've never seen so many pumpkins in one place.

It looks like pumpkin pie, roast pumpkin and pumpkin soup for every meal in our house until next Christmas at least - and worse still the soup freezes to perfection. Help!