EDIT: I decided to install a custom journal skin since I could. I'm living the fancy life now!

First off, yes I harvested my pumpkins a while ago. I've been meaning to do this journal for about a month, but one thing or another came up, then the freelancing picked up. But I'm finally getting around to telling you the oh-so-exciting facts about this year's pumpkin growing. For those who are totally blindsided by me expressing interest in anything other than videogames, anime, and tv shows, I do in fact have other interests, I just tend to stick to the previously mentioned stuff here. I could write long journals about my opinions on politics and current events and all sorts of things, but this is deviant ART, you're not here for me rambling about my generally libertarian political views. I suppose my opinions on video games might be more relevant, but I'm not really sure how much the journal function is supposed to be like one's own personal blog in the first place. But to get back to the main point, I am rather interested in growing pumpkins, because I like them. They are one of the symbols of Halloween and autumn, which are my favorite holiday theme and season respectively, and they are one of the few things in the world that make orange work for me. And furthermore, between the pumpkins at stores and the sudden spike in favorites for previous jack o'lantern pictures, I think it's safe to assume other people like pumpkins too.

Now that said, here's a photo of this year's pumpkin harvest. Not the best photo ever, but it gets the job done. As I said in the description, this was intended to just be a picture for this journal, but then I found out that requires a subscription. So unless I get one somehow, this'll have to do. It's not a bumper crop by any stretch, no records were even close to set, but it's a lot better than last year, in which I managed to grow one 8 pound pumpkin. WEAK. This year I grew a total of 128 pounds worth of pumpkins, with the biggest a half decent and personal record-setting 28 pounds. And aside from the gouges from squirrels chewing on them, (more on that in a bit,) I think they looked better than store-bought pumpkins. The skin was quite glossy and the shade of orange is incredibly brilliant. Plus, they are all organic. I even risked being trampled to personally collect manure to fertilize them with by hand. The cows in the nearby meadow this year were MEAN and a few were all black with white faces so I think they were Hollows. And entirely seriously, at one point they stampeded me out of the meadow. Luckily I was prepared and had an escape route planned at every step. Just like video games have taught me well, sometimes gathering materials is dangerous, but you need them to make things. In this case, fertilizer brew.

Aggro cows weren't the only danger to pumpkin growing, though. I could run from them, but my poor pumpkins could not run from hungry deer and nibbly squirrels. My harvest probably would have been twice as big and consisted of bigger pumpkins had they not ravaged my crops at every opportunity. Like out of a cartoon, I kept stepping up the defense, and they kept stepping up the attacks by just a little more. First they ate the fruit itself, so I covered the pumpkins with cages. Then they started eating the leaves and plant parts, so I sprayed them with hot sauce. Then they avoided the spicy leaves, so I turned up the heat and the spraying, and they just developed a taste for it. From that point I gradually added more and more physical barriers, which all initially held for a while until the deer stepped up their aggression. At one point I thought plastic fence netting had me covered, but they ate a pumpkin through the net. Not that they could get their faces through, the holes were like a half inch a piece. No, a deer tried to chew the pumpkin with the net in it's mouth. This meant that nothing got in its mouth, all the pieces were laying around the pumpkin, but the fruit was ruined none the less. The real shocker was when they actually somehow picked up and moved a weighted cage that was over my biggest pumpkin at the time. They had never shown any signs of messing with cages, then one day, flipped over cage and half a pumpkin. RAGE. Plus, squirrels were always nibbling on my pumpkins, leaving them all scarred up. I'm not sure what I'll do differently next year, aside from build some sort of fencing around the pumpkins from day one. I'd really rather not, it makes watering and tending to the plants a pain, but the deer have made it clear, there's no other way. I'd like to set up a Team Fortress 2 sentry gun, that'd stop them with no cumbersome fencing, but I don't know any Engineers. And even if I did get one, you know it'd be sapped by a deer Spy.