Posted in Children, Garden Diary, Environmentalism, Experimentation, The Old Garden In Bristol on Wednesday, December 2nd 2020 (5.18 PM).
The previous post was about putting Halloween pumpkins in the garden to decompose. Now they’ve been there for a month, I thought it was about time to post a composite of their gradual decay into the soil.
It makes me a little sad to see this, especially given the goofy grin on The Child Who Likes Animals’ design. Still, I have to remind myself that it is inevitable, and they are just part of the circle of life and death in the garden. They have been broken down by mould, eaten by slugs and snails, and are now feeding the herbs and the honeysuckle.
Halloween, pumpkin, squash, decay, back bed, autumn
Posted in Children, Garden Diary, Environmentalism, Experimentation, The Old Garden In Bristol on Sunday, November 8th 2020 (10.14 AM).
The other day, over on the main blog, I briefly mentioned that the Hallowe’en pumpkins have been put into the darkest corner of the garden, the southern end of the back bed, for the local slugs and snails to eat. As not much grows successfully in that corner of the back bed save for sweet cicely and (once) tree spinach, it tends to be left as something of a wildlife corner; and The Child Who Likes Animals likes to leave things like melon rind there, to see how it attracts invertebrates and to watch it decay. So, a week ago when it was time to put the hollowed-out carved pumpkins in the food waste, we thought it might be a nice idea to leave them in the garden instead.
It was getting towards twilight yesterday when I took this photo; but you can see that there are a number of small slugs greatly enjoying them. Mould is spreading, too, and spiders are using them to lurk behind. If they behave like a melon rind does, the flesh will slowly disappear and possibly in a few weeks time only a papery skin will be left.
Halloween, pumpkin, squash, decay, back bed, autumn
