Check out that cactus!!

Recently I purchased a cute little 6 pot cactus kit complete with dirt and a small plastic greenhouse. Having 3 boys I thought it'd be cool to have them see who's cactus would grow the fastest. They would each have 2 pots and I put their names on each one. We were all set for the cactus growing contest.

Until someone knocked over the pots/greenhouse and the dirt spilled. As best I could I got the dirt back into the pots with no idea where the seeds were. The directions had said to place them just below the surface of the soil.

Like any good homeschool mom I say, “Oh well!” and ended up putting all the soil and whatever seeds were left into two larger pots we already owned. One pot had been used for planting acorns this past fall but they'd been watered to the point of rotting. So I dumped out most of the soil and added the cactus seed/soil mixture that was left.

About 3 days after I noticed something breaking through the soil and I thought “Wow! I'm the cactus growing queen of the world. (insert soundtrack from The Titanic) Check me out.”

On the fourth day I began to suspect something was a little unusual but was still holding onto my “queen” concept.

By day five I knew something had to be going on. I mean, these things were huge! Either I'd bought gi-normous cactus plants (and they'd all gotten into one pot) or something else was happening.

Well, here's the pictures of Pot #1 and Pot #2

Don't you think there's something a little unusual going on?

Me too!! It took me a while to figure it out but when I saw this rather large light brown seed attached to one of the leaves I figured it out. The brown pot has pumpkin seeds in it… thanks to my 6 year old!! Pumpkin seeds!!! And I thought they were cactuses (is that a word?)

Pot with pumpkin seeds