It's the Great Pumpkin!

It's the Saturday before Hallowe'en, and that means only one thing... getting pumpkins at a nearby pumpkin patch!

A central Missouri pumpkin patch is very different from an Orange County pumpkin patch, which is likely to be a couple of hundred pumpkins trucked into the corner of a Trader Joes' parking lot & set up on some haphazardly arranged hay bales. Nope, here you get in the van & head down some dirt road to the farm that puts in an acre or three of pumpkins every year for just this purpose, and you are greeted by the very nice farmer's wife who gives you a little wheelbarrow & a pair of secateurs & wishes you happy pumpkin hunting, and then you head off into an honest-to-goodness Pumpkin Patch, trying not to trip over the dried & withered vines which cross the paths every which way.

This late in the year, most of the vegetation has pretty much died off, and a fair number of the pumpkins are past their prime as well, either mushy & rotting where they sit or else so full of squash-borer beetles that their surfaces are positively pock-marked. But there are still lots of sound pumpkins, and we hunt for good ones -- round, orange, and basketball-sized. Or at least two out of three. Ali finds a good one still on the vine, and has a little tussle with the secateurs before she can finally liberate it. Squash vine is tough, woody stuff, isn't it?

She eventually gnaws her way through it with the clippers & carries her prize back to the wheelbarrow. She is getting so tall and so lovely, I don't know what to think sometimes. Of course, she has that whole slouchy teen attitude thing going on too, which she is perfecting today. "Mom, don't take my picture."

Hunter, in the meantime, has rejected all the offerings in the immediate area and is searching far & wide over the whole patch for the perfect pumpkin. I have no idea what the heck he is doing here. It looks like he's trying to sneak up on a wily squash. "Be vewy, vewy quwiet...."

He finds one, eventually, that suits his requirements, which after all are only two: 1) It must be reasonably free of bugs and 2) it must be bigger than his sister's pumpkin. A little brother, of course, has some things upon which he can never compromise. Hunter's pumpkin has an interesting green speckling all around it, which leads me to suspect it's not the ripest pumpkin in the patch, but it'll be fine for carving.

Finally, when we get all our pumpkins selected (I choose a slightly lopsided but smooth yellow one for Mike, as well as a perfectly round green-and-orange one for myself), we go back up to the front where the very nice farmer weighs our purchases on an old-fashioned produce scale that looks at least twenty years older than I am. Would you believe we had 47 pounds of pumpkin between us?

Tomorrow, we carve.