Cinderella Pumpkins

my Cinderella seedlings!

Last autumn, I bought the best pumpkin of my life so far at The Garden Patch in town.  A Cinderella Pumpkin.  It was a beautiful dark orange.  It was shapely.  It remained as vibrant and solid as ever for eight months... first on display for the autumn, then on top of the trunk at the bottom of my bed while it snowed, and Christmas came and went, and spring unfolded.  And then last Monday, the same day my sister and I squished beetles, I cracked it open and planted its seeds.  The Cinderella pumpkin is the French heirloom 'Rouge Vif D'Étampes' which means 'bright red of Étampes', a place I think is about 30 miles from the center of Paris.  Supposedly these pumpkins take about a hundred days to mature.  Unless they are fickle, I should have my very own Cinderellas around September 20th!  Maybe I'm just going through a phase, but I can't imagine liking any other variety of pumpkin nearly as much as this one.


I managed to paint a few zinnias, and hope to do more in the coming days...

I also painted the potato blossoms, and realized they are very sweet smelling flowers.  They smell like honey - not  light and sugary like clover honey, but a musky, rich sweet like chestnut honey.  

We have raspberries galore in the garden.  My sister picked these (and many more) and she and my mom made a big batch of delicious jam.  Today I think I will visit the neighboring farm to pick some blueberries!