Last fall we tossed a bumpy green pumpkin out into the garden to compost (and get picked apart by animals) and this spring, up came a squash-y looking plant near that spot. Several months (and many flowers) went by and eventually the little plant put on one, medium sized, olive green pumpkin. We left it alone until the cold weather began to set in, then we plucked it and brought it inside to carve for Halloween.
That is where things became very strange! The little fellow was really thick skinned and difficult to cut. In fact, it’s bottom was attached to its top on the inside, so we had to cut the whole center out of the pumpkin so that we could hollow it out, then put it back together again to make it into a lantern!
Another very strange thing is that it smelled exactly like cucumber-melon scented lotion… I braved a bite of the flesh and it tasted like cucumber as well!
I knew that pumpkins, squash, cucumbers and melons are all related (the family is called “cucurbitaceae”), so I wondered if maybe our little green friend was some kind of a hybrid between a pumpkin and a cucumber..? From researching, I learned that apparently a cuke/pumpkin hybrid is unlikely to have happened, but I also learned that sometimes a cucurbitaceae family member gone wild will become more cucumber-ish smelling. Members of this family even contain a compound that is not good to ingest too much of and the wilder they go, the more of it they have. So, that being said, this little guy is going to go directly into the compost after it’s done being a jack-o-lantern. 🙂