(Short-lived) Pumpkin Fun

Kelvin has never carved a pumpkin before. And despite my sentiments that pumpkin patches/fall activities are a bit corny unless you have a cute toddler to dress up and place on a pumpkin for photos, and that it might be odd to go sans children to such a place, we went anyway.

On Saturday, we visited Christie's pumpkin patch outside of Blue Lake, the sunnier town east of here. Despite being the only childless couple there, we had a good time. There were no entrance fees (! How rare is that nowadays?!) and we got to ride a wagon way out to the fields, which were totally packed with rows and rows of pumpkins of all different varieties (we bypassed the corn maze which was not nearly as cool as the World's Largest corn maze in Dixon, which is located outside our old stomping ground of Sac).

Sunflowers on the way in


Rows and rows...






I thought the short, squat, red pumpkins were pretty cool-looking (although they are apparently better for eating/not so good for carving)


Squash


Weird-looking little pumpkin


It was a beautiful, sunny day (apparently October is when summer starts in Humboldt County!) and we spent quite a while picking our our perfectly sized and shaped pumpkins, which we planned to carve the next day... although that didn't happen...



Since the pumpkins, straight from the patch, had quite a bit of dirt on them, we elected to leave them outside on our front porch as Halloween/fall decor rather than bringing them inside. We'd planned to carve them on Sunday (we had even gotten some pumpkin carving kits with tools!). However, they didn't even last a day.

I got called into a delivery around 1 a.m. on Sunday morning. I know the pumpkins were intact outside our house when I left; however, when I returned a few hours later, they were not. When I drove back into our development and saw a smashed pumpkin in the middle of the street, I immediately knew it was one of our carefully chosen ones... and found the other one smashed around the corner from our house.

It was pretty sad. We are not sure if it was done out of malice, boredom, or both... or who the perpetrators were who took away a small piece of our fall joy, but we are bummed (At least I was. Kelvin, who was the optimist here, was just happy that they didn't smash the pumpkins into our house). I remember some pumpkins in college that Cathleen and I carved were similarly destroyed... and I felt very violated. I am disappointed that I'm not going to be able to make my pumpkin curry or toasted pumpkin seeds this week, but more that K still hasn't carved a pumpkin! In any case, we may get some Safeway pumpkins to carve just for Halloween itself, but you can be sure we are not leaving them outside for any length of time (but are empty pumpkins as much fun to smash, I wonder?).

Luckily, we have a compost bin [see previous post!] that accommodated the pumpkin pieces that we (well, Kelvin) felt obligated to retrieve from the street... although it is now so heavy I can barely turn it!

On another note (so as to not end on a downer), here is a fun pumpkin memory...
Me beside a 900+ lb pumpkin at the Alaska State Fair in 2010.
THAT would be hard to carve!!