It’s 19 days to Halloween and you are concerned that your three volunteer pumpkins may not turn orange in time.

Let’s define a volunteer pumpkin. Back in May, you dropped a load of compost at your allotment plot at Thorncliffe Park Garden Club. The compost contained seeds from the 2011 pumpkins that had framed the steps to your front door.

Two hundred and fifty children had run the gauntlet past your 2011 pumpkins last Halloween. How do you know the exact number? Because your spouse had purchased 250 mini chocolate bars from the Loblaws Superstore, and when the last Kit Kat had vanished, you had turned out the front lights and cowered upstairs, hoping the doorbell would not ring again, but knowing that some worldly-wise older kids who were too cool to wear costumes would still thump your front door at 9:30 p.m. to trick or treat, well aware that you were hiding out with the candles blown out and the lights off.

(Okay, maybe 243 kids if we do the math: 250 mini chocolate bars, minus the four Kit Kats and 3 Oh Henry!s you scarfed down in between rings of your doorbell and pretending to calmly read Heather Mallick’s latest column in the Toronto Star).

Your 2012 compost pile sprouted some interesting vegetable “volunteers.” A telltale pair of rounded leaves growing quickly signalled a pumpkin plant in the making. You let it live and take its nitro-nourishment from the decomposing pile.

Thinking back to your days as a rookie allotment gardener, you knew that one pumpkin plant was plenty. You had learned that lesson the hard way. In your first year at the garden, you had planted a half dozen pumpkin seedlings, and each had run rampant in the summer months, squishing your leeks, throttling your tomatoes, sumo-wrestling your red currant bushes into submission, and threatening to lay seige to your neighbors’ orderly garden plots.

Yes, one pumpkin plant was plenty. And your 2012 “volunteer” was quickly filling every available crevice of your plot with its prickly vines and broad leaves.

Soon, three pumpkins sprouted on orange blossoms. You went on holiday and your plot neighbor Azeem kindly daily-doused your volunteer pumpkin with water while you huffed and puffed along the coastal trails of Cinque Terra. On your return, you found triplets — three decent-sized green pumpkins attached to the umbilical cord of your volunteer vine.

You wanted to let your volunteer pumpkins ripen to an orange hue. But by late September they were big enough that some of your garden plot neighbors began to worry. In polite terms, they suggested that your plump pumpkins might take a walk. Better to pick them now, knowing that a modest-sized green pumpkin in hand is worth more than three orange prize-winners in the hands of garden thieves. Your garden neighbor Andy was more blunt: “Pick them up!” he shouted. “Somebody gonna pick ’em for you.”

So you loaded the green pumpkins into the hatch of your minivan, and stuffed the dying vines into brown yard-waste bags.

Several weeks later, and with Halloween fast approaching, your trio of pumpkins are still green.

Your spouse is getting ready to purchase this year’s ration of 250 mini chocolate bars. But you are starting to sweat it. Will a trio of oval-shaped green pumpkins attract children to your house?  Will you neighbors think this is some kind of statement? Can you even carve a green pumpkin? Are these not pumpkins but some kind of mutant hybrid squash?

James Taylor’s lyric runs through your head and you curse yourself, knowing that you really should have waited until the frost was on the pumpkin, and the hay was in the barn — and your dark green pumpkins had turned a lovely orange in time for Halloween.

But there are still 19 days left, and maybe you can place your pumpkins at a good angle to take in the sun on your front porch, and you live in hope.