Hello and welcome to today’s video! teammate sent me this puzzle, and some of my viewers gave it rave reviews. Alright, let’s take a look at this puzzle on the screen. This looks like a standard Pumpkin Patch puzzle which all of you should be familiar with.

I’m told these numbers are part of getting a hidden message and that we should ignore them entirely. This means that there’s a twist: there are absolutely no given pumpkins! What a wonderful concept, I hope I am able to do this puzzle justice.

We’ve solved many Pumpkin Patches on this channel before so I’ll leave out the rules this time; you all must be experts at this puzzle type by now. And as usual, I’ll be narrating my thoughts as I go through this puzzle, making Pumpkin Patch notes along the way.

Let us start by looking at this asymmetric region I’ve highlighted here. There’s usually something in this region in Pumpkin Patch puzzles, but for a special puzzle like this, we can’t be so sure, so let’s come back to it later.

Going back to basics, the first thing to note while starting Pumpkin Patches is that the scarecrow is scared of gravestones, so it always runs in the opposite direction. This confirms our first region... and that gives us another region instantly. We got this one through pure logic - this next region will look like this.

How do we split this inner region then? Can we do it like this? No, I think not, because this space wouldn’t be able to fit another region, and all regions need to be contiguous of course. So this is how it should look.

Moving up to the northwest corner of this grid, I have a hunch that we can place a patch just like this. Uhh, scratch that, I think I see how to proceed from here. We need witches.

Yes, because we know that witches are always 10 minutes late, the shape of this patch must look like this. This is a tight construction; it couldn’t have worked if other regions were colored differently!

Hmm what next? Let’s see... okay we know that in the presence of a candle, a lantern always burns 10 units faster, so we can pencil in this part of the grid. Hold up, I think I might have misremembered that rule. Lanterns only burn 5 units faster, not 10, so this region here can’t exist like this.

Let’s step back for a moment and see if we can use any global constraints to determine the structure of some of the other patches in this puzzle. Since the right side of the grid is empty, let’s use that side for our scratch work for now. Earlier in our deduction we placed a region that looked like this. We also tried to place a patch that looks like this. But that also didn’t work out...

Ah, okay, I see how we can make more progress! In the Pumpkin Patch puzzle, zombies are much slower than usual. In fact they’re twice as slow. So, this patch down here cannot contain any zombies. Now that we know this, we can... first let’s use the undo button to get rid of all this rubbish.

Okay, look at this area right here - remember how it overlaps with our scratch work? Well it turns out that we were on the right track, and we may keep this patch as a direct result of the previous rule. This rewards us with another terrific logical leap.

See this empty middle column? This means that these 5 squares have to belong to the same region. It could be longer, but we know that it has to be at least this length.

And the patch in the bottom-left actually tells us more than this. In fact, the entire column needs to be part of a single patch. Wow, this is exciting. It could very well bleed into other columns later, but for now let’s leave this penciled in.

Oh! I forgot! The friendly apparitions in pumpkin patches always slow down to talk to the slowest object. For example, this region here is quite slow. Notice that this region over here, too, would also be affected by the rule.

Now let’s look at the top. There’s some nifty logic up here: beginners may want to directly connect the corner to the center of the grid and color in this patch. However, doing so leaves behind these two small impossible regions. We can fix them by including them.

Just the right side remains now... It can be hard noting all the rules in a Pumpkin Patch, but there’s a blindingly simple way to remember what’s going on with eyeballs. Are you ready for it?

Human eyeballs come in pairs, and so do the eyeballs in this puzzle. And that’s how we know that this is its own region.

And with that colored, I think we’re almost there! If I do this... No, that doesn’t quite work because we know that there’s only one region left in this puzzle. So, by the process of elimination, the entire unshaded area must be its own single patch!

Since there’s nothing special about pumpkins, this means we have solved the puzzle. That’s the end of my Pumpkin Patch notes, I hope they help your puzzle-solving! Thank you all for joining us in solving this absolute masterpiece of a puzzle. And with that, we conclude this video. Did you follow the mouse into dead ends? Goodbye!