I Used a Mower to Harvest My Pumpkins

G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me, and have you ever seen a pumpkin patch mowed before? Well, you're about to, and I'm going to show you how having a pumpkin vine for lawn can be way more productive. Let's gourd into it. You know, sometimes you'll go away for three weeks, or you can't maintain your vegetable garden, and it'll get overgrown by weeds and grasses, and you'll come back all defeated knowing that you've got a heck of a lot of work to do. And other times, you'll have a rare opportunity to come back to a garden that has been overrun with a vegetable or fruit or some crop that you never expected would get so far out of hand. And yes, you've got a lot of maintenance ahead of you because it's gone feral, but on the upside, you can get a whole heap of produce out of it. And yeah, I agree, this mess behind me is a bit daunting. You can't eat an elephant pumpkin in one bite. So I've decided that we're going to do it in smaller pieces. And even I was shocked at how many pumpkins we found in just this one small strip on the right-hand side of our vegetable garden. At one point, I didn't know if I needed a lawnmower or combine harvester. Good thing I made carefully because one wrong move and I'd have a pumpkin squash. You know, you'd be surprised at how hard these pumpkins are to see. Absolutely beautiful. Wow. Nice size. Heavy. So how is it that these pumpkin plants got so out of control? Well, I have to tell you, I did not sow one seed or plant one pumpkin plant at all. These came up naturally. They're called a Kent pumpkin or Japanese pumpkin, and they are actually one of the most common pumpkins you can buy in Australia in the supermarket because they are really great eating. And I suppose they're easy to grow in numbers. In a climate like this, when food prices are going up, you don't want to miss an opportunity of getting a glut of something as productive as pumpkins. They're good for you. They're a good carb. They fill the stomach. They store for a long time. You can do all sorts of things with them, from savories through to desserts. So I'd much rather have an untidy looking vegetable garden and a rough looking lawn than a beautiful looking lawn and a tidy veggie garden, but no food. Come out when all the work's done, eh? Huh? Have to come out when all the work was done. Well, that was fun. Good job. Right on camera. Well, that's just no shame. On the freshly grown, on the freshly, on the freshly, on the, on the freshly mown lawn. How terrible. Yeah, and then she leaves me. I don't know. Another one going on there. Well, we'll give her some privacy. What I wanted to show you though was not that, was the lawn. After all that pumpkin has been grown through it. This will recover real quick, but there's not a lot to recover. All this will get mulched, is all going to die, and the lawn will come back through that bigger and better and greener. That's why our lawn's so green. I've never fertilized our lawn ever. It's just been mowed and mulched back in, just like this. And often there's other plants that get mulched in the grass, and it just comes back beautiful and green. But hey, we've done well for that strip. Look at that. There's some beauties in here, and there's some small ones too. The thing is we're heading into winter, and so the pumpkin growing is slowing down, and all this will probably die back in a month. So it's right to start harvesting and getting rid of it and mowing it down. It's just that there's still a few good pumpkins that I reckon I can get out of the season yet. So I'm going to leave some of it to continue for the next few weeks, and see if we can get a few more out of it, because food is valuable. Which reminds me, how do you fix a broken pumpkin? With a pumpkin patch. Some of them are really great, like these two here on the end. They're very heavy, extremely heavy for their size. Boy, you can get a good workout with them. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, I know you did, Peter. Peter, Peter, you pumpkin eater. And for the rest of you, if you did, make sure you give it a big pumpkin thumbs up, share it around, and subscribe if you haven't already. Thanks a lot for watching. Bye for now. Cheers.