There was a pumpkin plant growing out of the sink of my half-bath.
I’m amazed at how big it got considering there was really no nourishment other that the water from washing our hands and the little bit of sunlight coming in through the small window.
As far as we can tell, my wife must’ve washed her hands in that sink after gutting the pumpkins used for carving this halloween. My 9 year old daughter exclaimed, there’s a plant growing out of our drain!
My wife extracted it, and the split, fugly looking pumpkin seed shell. I relocated this little guy to one of our pots in the kitchen. May as well see how far he can get.
If I’ve learned anything from Jurassic Park, it’s that life always finds a way. The OP is in real trouble though if the pumpkin changes sex and starts to reproduce.
It is like a pumpkin seed, which, when sown within the sink, is the flattest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all vines, and puts forth large gourds, so that the children of the neighbourhood can make grinning visages upon them.
Something very similiar happened in my house as a child. I used to keep my hamster in the bathroom sink while I washed his cage in the tub. He must have spit out some seeds he was storing in his cheeks, because one day little green shoots appeared in the drain.
The funny thing was that my aunt came out of the bathroom that morning telling us about the plants growing out of the drain, and NO ONE would go in to check. No one believed her… It was April first. It wasn’t confirmed by anyone else 'till evening.
Oooh, can you grow a brand new jack o’lantern under a heat lamp or something? Why yes, I’m not a gardener, how’d you know that?
It’d be incredibly cool to have your own mini-Halloween in March.
[irritating pedant] Seeds don’t need sunlight to sprout. They just need warmth and moisture. Lots of seeds planted in the soil, where it’s completely dark, manage to grow OK.[/irritating pedant]
The pumpkin sprout is very cool, though. Behold the bathroom sink, giver of life!
Well, sunlight does penetrate the soil to some degree. There are lots of seeds that are “light-dependent” germinators, and if you plant them too far in, they won’t sprout. I don’t know off the top of my head if pumpkins are one of them. Since the general rule of thumb is to plant seeds as deep as they are wide, I’d guess they’d be pretty happy fairly far down, and thus, fairly dark.
As for nutrients, that little guy’s not big enough to have needed any other than his own seed guts. Good thing you found him when you did though, he’s about big enough to start eating.
Well, it’s better than the mushrooms growing out of my kitchen and bathroom baseboards. :o Fixing the leak in the kitchen solved those but the bathroom ones continue to reappear. Superscrubber and Tilex to the rescue!
You know how some kitchen drain baskets have that rubber stopper thing underneath? Once, when I was rinsing beans, some of the smaller ones escaped the collander and wedged between the stopper and the underside of the drain basket. A few days later, beansprouts were sticking out of the holes in the basket.
It was cool, but kind of stinky because the beans had allowed other stuff to get lodged in the gap.
When I moved in with my SO, he had a bathmat in front of a sliding glass door, to keep the cat from tracking in. Well, the bathmat had a rubber back, and the glass door always had condensation on it, because of the fishtanks. The first time I went to vacuum the carpet, I lifted that bath mat to find mushrooms growing out of the carpetting in the livingroom. Yuck!
Yay. I like to see that someone else rewards these tenacious little creatures. So far my husband and I have so-rewarded a bulb of garlic (we are waiting to harvest its offspring as we speak), a very plucky little scallion, and a sweet potato that basically grew a tree out of its butt before we planted it.
There’s something about these plucky plants that tugs at our heart strings, so we try to save them when they show special perseverance.