Mystery Plant

Earlier this summer, in the midst of our berry bushes (which, sidenote, have not been very productive), a mystery plant started sprouting.  It looked like a squash, but you see, none of us here like squash very much, so the likelihood of that mysteriously being planted was slim to none. 

Lookie there!  It's Camilla in the background!

Interestingly enough (or not, but humor me, ok?), the mystery plant started taking over the berry bed.  And the yard.  And just about the next three blocks of the neighborhood.  Clearly this was not a squash.  Too big and trailing and the leaves were slightly different.  I wasn't sure if we were operating a Lateral Jack-In-The-Beanstalk or a Little Shoppe of Horrors.

 There were flowers galore.  GALORE, folks.  Hmmmm, like at least 50.  And then I remembered a packet of seeds for those tiny pumpkins that you use to decorate with in the fall that my mom had given me a year or so ago (sidenote: ignore how completely ungrammatical that sentence was, please).  I think we may have tossed them in the berry bed.  So, we decided that that was what the mystery plant must be.  Mini pumpkins.

But alas, as we continued to watch and catch snakes and swoon over dead mice odor and be carried away by ants patiently wait, no pumpkins materialized.  And then one day, we spotted the following:

And as it turns out, what we have is a lovely GOURD vine.  When we spotted the first one, Matthew suddenly remembered tossing an old rotten gourd in the berry bed last fall.  I love the wartiness of this kind of gourd.  We've spotted five or six gourds in varying size, so our autumn decorating may be in the bag this year!