It's that time of year! Halloween is over and it is time to cook up all our pumpkins and turn them into pumkin bread, pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies, pumpkin pie, pumpkin ice cream, and pumpkin soup! I really just love everything about pumpkins - the various shapes and colors, how they can be used for decoration and then food, and the way their vines grow crazily all over the place.
Our first experience growing pumpkins was back when we lived in Kansas. Our neighbors put two good- sized, still perfectly useable pumpkins out on the curb to be picked up on trash day. We rescued them and put them in our shed. Unfortunately, they froze before we got a chance to use them, so we tossed them whole in the compost pile. The next year, the seeds sprouted and vines grew straight out of our compost! It was a very welcome surprise and we let them grow and take over a large area of the yard.
This year, we planted seeds from one of last year's pumpkins that was sadly sitting around until April. BugMan spread the seeds around some of our fruit trees so they would get plenty of water. From that one pumpkin, around 70 more grew. We were able to harvest 30 of them, but sadly, the rest of them were destroyed in various stages by grasshoppers, javelinas, and our chickens. Bugman spent the better part of two days cooking, pureeing, and putting pumpkin in the freezer. And since beginning this blog post, I interrupted writing long enough to make a double batch of pumpkin chocolate chip cookies (and have already eaten too many)!
In our neck of the woods (or grasslands, rather), we lack the beautiful autumn colors and leaves falling all around. I miss that from our years in the Midwest and Back East. But other markers of Fall are cooler daytime temperatures and freezing nights - we certainly get those. And a bountiful harvest of fruit of the vine and of the tree - we are getting those too. Welcome to the season of sweetness and spice and a warm kitchen.
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