Letter home from my deployment in 2010: Pumpkins in Afghanistan
We don’t have pumpkins yet, but they are growing like weeds and we have flowers so hopefully soon we will have little baby pumpkins. It is crazy how much fun taking care of the garden is.
Even though it is hot and going back and forth to get the water is sometimes annoying, but it is always a good break from work even if it is only a few minutes. Speaking of watering, I have to share how we water the plants. The HVAC units (CHICOs) have an outlet valve that drips water, so we have buckets over the best drippers and collect water that way. It has been hot, since the start of Ramadan (called Ramazan in Afghanistan), so the plants have needed lots of water.
The pumpkins are not enjoying the hot days either.
I am just happy that I don’t have to fast. Eid (the end celebration for Ramadan) is about 20 days away (9 Sept) and we are hoping to celebrate the celebration with our local national engineers.
Well, if you wanted to know there are 71 days until Halloween. Each day we are a little closer to going home. Thanks for all the love and support and all the care packages too. They have been awesome morale raisers and I truly enjoy them. And since I share them with the team, they enjoy them too.
A few months later I sent pictures of our pumpkins, not from our garden.
We ended up only having one small pumpkin not big enough for carving. Here is the letter I sent home after carving our pumpkins one of the interpreters got for us off base
Look it is our pumpkins!! Mine is orange! Luckily it is dark so you can’t tell that they are green pumpkins. The Afghan we asked to get the pumpkins didn’t understand what a pumpkin was and our crazy tradition. We still had fun! We used glow sticks to light them up. Happy Halloween from Afghanistan.
I love hearing a woman’s perspective on serving in the armed forces. Thank you for your service. Thank you for speaking out about your story. It’s an important story and one we all need to hear.
Love the green pumpkin.
So very cool!! I came across this looking for afghani green pumpkins as I have just obtained a few extremely rare seeds from a rare seed collector from Colorado! Gardens small or big keeps our spirits nourished! Thanks for sharing!!
How cool. Our interpretured didn’t understand our crazy tradition. I didn’t realize the green pumpkins were a rare thing in Afghanistan.
Check out high desert seeds in Colorado! There’s an amazing story on their humongous “green zebra pumpkin” and how they obtained the seeds!
They don’t have the seeds for this year ast they had
A pest problem but I was very lucky to get a few of their stock seeds!!