For one thing: DON'T step in your garden when its wet. Just leave it alone, you'll only compact the soil. Any cultivated soil will become thick, deep mud when when. I am very proud that rows in my garden have two feet of mud after it rains - I had to till deeply and repeatedly to get it that way! I also have a garden over clay with drainage problems (at the bottom of a hill). My solution has been to shovel deeply between rows down to more compacted soil, and to pile dirt into taller rows. The path between rows is more solid because it is just a little topsoil over clay and can be walked on when wet, and the rows themselves do not go under water. All that shoveling is also a great workout! You can see it here where the furrows are wet, but can be walked on, and the rows themselves have dried out.

I've been battling these things for years. I wait for a nice warm sunny day when they've congregrated on large groups and I splash them with warm sudsy water (I just use dish soap). I found this idea online somewhere and it said the detergent degrades their wings and the water drowns them. All I know is it works, it's harmelss to the environment (I think) and I have a clean deck/house after I hose away all the remenants. (Inside the house I suck them up with the vacuum or flush them down the toilet)

Larry, It looks good and I think you'll have a beautiful mess three months from now. How much room does Seminole need? All the room you have. It will grow and grow and grow. That's why I love it so. Even better, the pumpkins have a very hard shell and last forever. I still have about 20 of them left in storage from last year's crop. I've had them last well over a year sometimes. You'll practically need a machete' or a chainsaw to cut them open, and I believe that very hard shell is the reason they store so well and for so long. I've never had a pest bother them, but I've got voles eating plants in the back garden which is where the Seminole is growing and I'm getting worried they'll get the Seminole roots. The voles seem upstoppable since they are moving underground and they do so deeply enough (in old gopher tunnels apparently) that you cannot tell where their runs are, making it hard to trap them. I'm wishing I had planted more Seminole in the front garden too....but, then, the voles have been in the front garden too, first eating potatoes and now they are eating the roots of flowering plants and herbs. I'm starting to wonder if I'll have anything left by fall. It isn't that they are taking a lot....just a plant here and a plant there, but after a few months, it starts adding up. The native people who grew them in Florida let them climb up into the trees. I wonder how they harvested them? (Because, as you can tell, a Seminole could easily climb 30 or 40 feet up into a tree.) Maybe they pulled the vines and the whole mess came down out of the trees or maybe they just left them up there until they fell on their own. When mine have climbed into the trees, I used a ladder to get as close as I could and then I yanked on the vines and pulled them down. I did it while the vines were still green, thinking if I waited until after a freeze that the vines would be brittle and would break without the pumpkins coming down out of the tree. I bet you're going to have a great Seminole pumpkin harvest in the fall! Dawn

I have a somewhat different version of that old lady and her shenanigans. She travels around and visits anybody she chooses to. I keep her in my favorites file; she must have sneaked out and paid you a visit. That's okay, but please keep her there!! Sue