LINCOLN SQUARE — This Halloween, one Lincoln Square neighbor can save himself a trip to the pumpkin patch in search of a Jack-o'-lantern.
That's because he's got a couple of the gourds growing in his yard, courtesy of a bit of an "oops" on the part of the city's Water Department.
"The Case of the Mysterious Parkway Pumpkins" started months ago, when city crews removed a diseased tree from the parkway in front of the home of Andy Buchanan, who lives in the 4900 block of North Oakley Street.
"We had this big bare patch there, and we thought, 'Oh no, are they going to leave it that way?'" Buchanan recalled.
No, the city was not.
Buchanan returned home from work one day to find his parkway covered in what he could only describe as a "weird carpetlike thing."
It wasn't sod. It didn't really look like grass seed.
"What the heck did they throw down here?" he wondered. "I just couldn't figure it out. I had never seen anything like it."
The "carpet" eventually sprouted, but instead of lawn, the parkway was now home to a mass of weeds.
"It started growing and growing. It got to about 2 feet," Buchanan said.
He and his wife poked around in the tangle and spotted something flowering.
"A bulb was growing. It was low to the ground, it was buried among these weeds," said Buchanan.
"We said, 'Let's just let it go and see what happens,'" he said.
The bulb, and its siblings, continued expanding, eventually turning a telltale shape and color. They were pumpkins.
How did they wind up in Buchanan's yard? "Some new city program I'm not aware of?" he asked.
Buchanan called his alderman's office (the 40th Ward) and 311, inquiring about the origins of the "carpet," but the mystery persisted.
Streets & Sanitation seemed a likely culprit, but a spokeswoman told DNAinfo that the department's Bureau of Forestry removes trees but doesn't otherwise sod or seed.
A 311 operator had suggested to Buchanan that the Water Department may have played a role, a clue that eventually cracked the case.
Spokeswoman Megan Vidis confirmed to DNAinfo that the Department of Water Management had performed some work at Buchanan's address and restored the parkway "through the use of hydroseed."
Hydroseeding (also known as hydro mulching) uses a hose to spray a mixture of water, seeds, fertilizer and mulch — aka, "weird carpetlike thing" — onto an area of land.
"The mixture applied for the reseeding has been used for over a decade with overwhelmingly good results," Vidis said via email. "While the mixture is formulated to grow grass, the intermittent rain this year has been more conducive to weed development."
None of this explains the pumpkins, though.
Perhaps a stray squash seed either hitched a ride into the hydroseed slurry, or the pumpkin plant is one of those "volunteers" that crops up like magic in gardens, having been deposited by a squirrel, bird or the wind and found a fertile home.
Vidis said the Water Department will reseed Buchanan's parkway.
He may be hoping for grass, but we have our fingers crossed for watermelon.
