Pumpkins and Power-ups

Hello, steemians and garden lovers!

For today's post, I decided to show you my pumpkin garden from last summer. At the end of the post, I'll tell you about my December power-ups.

I started my pumpkin patch last June at the local community garden, where I also grew my potatoes last summer. You can read about my potatoes in these 2 posts that I wrote a month ago.
https://steemit.com/hive-180821/@amberyooper/garden-stories-growing-potatoes-part-1
https://steemit.com/hive-180821/@amberyooper/garden-stories-growing-potatoes-part-2-harvesting-potatoes

For growing my pumpkins, I used an unused plot at the local community garden. The plot had been used the previous year, and was full of weeds, so I had to clean it out first before I could plant any pumpkins in it. Once I had most of the weeds pulled out, I put some black plastic down to cover the dirt and weeds in the part of the plot that I wasn't going to plant. I had 2 old bales of straw from the previous year that I decided to use for mulch around the pumpkin plants to help hold in moisture, and slow down the weed growth. I had started the pumpkin seeds earlier in the spring, and the plants were big enough to put out into the garden, so I planted them in the middle of the straw mulch. I put some chicken wire around the plants to protect them from the rabbits while they were still small. The plants were put into the garden plot in the middle of June, a bit late, but not too late.

The next picture that I took of the pumpkin plants was in the middle of July. It took the plants a while to get adjusted to the garden, but they finally started growing vines.

A couple of days after I took the previous picture, I did some work to the fence around the pumpkin plants to make it bigger. I was still trying to keep the vines inside the fence.

By the beginning of August, the pumpkin vines had spread out a lot, covering much of the garden.

I also found the first little pumpkin.

By the middle of August, there were several pumpkins on the vines.

By the first week of September, the pumpkin vines were starting to die in the middle, and the pumpkins were mostly ripe.

Since I grew the pumpkins mostly for fun, I gave most of them away, keeping 3 large ones for myself. These pumpkins are an old heirloom variety named Howden. They are a nice size field pumpkin, and grew very well for me. I will probably grow them again next year.

I was able to power up quite a bit of steem in December. The exchange rate between steem and SBD is very favorable to steem, so I got a lot of steem from the SBD rewards from some of my posts that paid out in December. At the end of November, my powered up SP was 1084. By powering up all of my steem in December, I was able to raise that total to 2006.482 as of today, December 30, 2021. I'm really happy with my December pay-out totals. I don't know how well January will go with powering up steem, that depends on the rewards from the posts that I write, and how many posts that I write. At this point in time, I'm still powering up 100% of my rewards to try to grow my account. This gives me a larger upvote to use when curating posts on steem. #club100

That's all I have for this post, thanks for reading it!