hey, I had a question. I was carving pumpkins with the fam tonight, and my nephew's pumpkin guts were full of... idk, they looked like bean sprouts. none of us had ever seen that before. you have any idea what that could be about?
Sounds like sprouts is exactly what you ran into! Only, pumpkin sprouts, probably not beans. :) Sometimes seeds decide to sprout inside of fruit (tomatoes do this a lot). I see this occasionally when I carve pumpkins that have been sitting at room temp for months. When the pumpkin is still growing, the plant pumps it full of Don’t Sprout Yet Hormones, but after it’s ripe and harvested and sitting around for a while, those hormones run out and the seeds wake up, find themselves in warm moist conditions, and think they are in the ground, and that it’s go time.
Here’s one of last year’s pumpkins that I found several seeds starting to germinate inside of. They can be hard to distinguish from the stringy guts, but I bet you saw some roots like these in yours. Because there’s no sunlight inside a sealed pumpkin, you’ll never find full-on green leaves, just pale white/yellow sprouts that are long and thin from trying to find the sun. Nothing wrong, just weird looking.
