So, should probably

explain the masthead picture. :) Not something you see in your everyday garden...unless you work for a CSI team or something :)

Every year I like to create something creepy that is not part of the yard display ... one of my larks I like to call Frog Queen follies.

I have two raised vegetable beds in my garden and last year I got so distracted with Halloween that I did not make time to plant any vegetables. (I really missed the fresh tomatoes) Anyway, while I am looking out my upstairs window at the garden below I get this idea to put a skeleton in one of the beds and pose it like it is pushing its way out of the ground, and think I should plant some vines that look like they are trying to pull him back down. Better yet, pumpkin vines!

I purchase two small pumpkin plants and start another 6 plants in my garden window.

Then I head out to the shop and grab a spare Bart and do some hardware removal and do my best to hide the remaining hardware with Fix-it to get him ready for the yard. I use a small piece of rebar to hold his head up and prop him in the bed.

I sprinkled two large bags of organic mulch over the skeleton to give him that half buried look. I knew going into this project that I was doing all this work for the sole purpose of taking pictures, I started too late in the summer for the vines to actually produce pumpkins by October. So, to get the dense foliage I wanted I had to over plant.

I started with two 4 week old Jack O' Lantern pumpkins planted in the bed around him. Over the next few weeks I continue to plant the pumpkin seeds I started in the house, so the vines are in various stages of growth. As the vines continue to grow I head out in the yard and train them through the mouth of the skeleton and through and around the ribcage and legs.

I purchased a few small Sugar Pumpkins to put in the bed to add to the look, I tried to lay the stems under existing vines to make it look like they had grown on the vines. I placed a fake crow on his rib cage and headed for the camera!

I took some decent pictures, but then my friend Marci Brandt (the person who photographs the Davis Graveyard - who also takes great garden photos) came over and took these amazing photos.

Yeah, when I see her stuff I wonder why I even bother :)

The plan is to permanently pose this skeleton in that vegetable bed and grow pumpkins or other vines around him each year - definitely a garden folly. He currently has a new friend....the scarecrow, but that is a story for another day.