While the Sydney climate is tremendously mild, which is great for many crops, it also encourages the growth of a heap of pests and diseases.

In particular, we’ve had little luck with pumpkins, cucumbers, and many types of beans and peas. Inevitably, they get attacked by powdery mildew, and that’s the end of them.

While I’ve found resistant varieties of peas and beans, I’d pretty much given up on pumpkins, etc.

So when one self-seeded in the garden in spring, I let it run, to see how long it would last before the mildew killed it off. The answer turned out to be: a long time, as evidenced in the picture above.

I think these are Queensland Blues, or similar, and they grew with great abandon, producing fruit after fruit.

In total, we harvest five pumpkins, with a total weight of approx. 21kg.

That’s a lot of pumpkin! 🙂

It highlights an important general principle, of the value of locally adapted crops. We’ll definitely be saving the seeds from these pumpkins, and planting them in future seasons…