I once intentionally grew pumpkins. It was one of my first forays into growing things from seed as a kid. It was not a particularly auspicious start for my gardening career. The pumpkins grew large, sprawling out on wayward vines, but their tendency to take up residence in a little-used laneway was their undoing, and my brother ran over them with a tractor.
This year we unintentionally grew pumpkins and had a much greater degree of success. We nearly always have some sort of mystery vine that volunteers, but this is the first time it's turned out to be pumpkins. They did an impressive job of taking over a large area of the lawn where presumably a farmer squirrel had deposited the seed the previous fall.
I can't claim that it was the most sincere pumpkin patch, and of course since we've had frost it's no longer extant and eligible to be visited by the Great Pumpkin in any case. Having grown them, we now question how Linus could spend any time sitting in a pumpkin patch, because those vines are very scratchy.
Our main question was whether these were eating pumpkins or ones best left for decor. They aren't the really large jack-o-lantern shape, but they aren't the cute pie kind either. We roasted a small one yesterday as a test and the flesh turned out to be suitably mashable just with a fork and not particularly stringy, so I think you'll be seeing a lot more pumpkin recipes soon.
We opted for this soup recipe for lunch to use up our first small pumpkin.
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