#pumpkin stems

So Pyrolga is a name I made up for this line of seeds I've been growing from some random white pumpkin I got at the grocery store a decade ago, variety unknown. Every year I toss out a random handful of Pyrolga seeds and I've gotten a really fascinating variety of vine and fruit traits. This is my "randomize character" line.

This year, I'm going to be growing seeds from a 2024 Pyrolga vine I liked. Its final product was an okay small round whitish pumpkin, which is kinda whatever, but I liked the vine traits: short vine, sturdy foliage, heat tolerant fruit set, neat green/yellow ripening pattern. Overall, decent roll of the genetic dice.

And then there's this guy. This much more common, much more... worse guy. Sometimes I actually cull it. In my head I call it a vampyrolga, which is not a good name because maybe you think I mean vampire in a cool way. No.

Vampire because IT BITES

All pumpkins have spines, and you Will get scratched, but these are by far the nastiest, sharpest, most densely-spiked variety I've had in my garden. Only type of pumpkin that has made me bleed. After harvest I have to go over stems like this with the spine of my knife to crush down all the spikes or else it's not handleable.

Vampire because it can't handle the sun. This guy has loooong and poor quality vines. Wimpy foliage that wilts dramatically in the daylight and no matter how well watered, and never recovers. Needs a victorian fainting couch. Leaves go crispy right away and look awful. Oldest 2/3 of the vine is always bare.

Finally, its fruit always seems to be malformed, as if from incomplete pollination. I don't know why that would happen so consistently on just this type (especially since most times I hand-pollinate with that in mind) unless there was something wrong with it. The vines always seem to have some kind of deformity so maybe this is part of that.