Charlie Brown would have fun here! In an earlier blog, I wrote about our journey into the land of giant pumpkins. Our largest pumpkin is estimated just over 600 pounds. We didn’t go crazy like the competitive growers, but they are a lot of work, rototilling, soil samples, soil amendments and fertilizer, installing special irrigation, burying vines and adding miccorhizae to help root growth. We added mulch as we went, so weeding was not a problem. We finished the growing season with 5 large pumpkins, the 600 pounder and another 4 in the 200-225 pound range. Our neighbors, Dave and Joan that got us started, had some beautiful huge pumpkins too. They win the style contest, but we were the biggest! So there!

With Halloween approaching and inviting Fall and Halloween displays, what to do with these giants? We decided to pool our pumpkins for one large display. So the next challenge was moving them. A special sling and a tractor did the trick, moving very slowly.

Maybe it was a good distraction during this crazy year.

Add hay bales, scarecrows, mums, a wheelbarrow graveyard of bones, and some added landscaping lights and we created a fun display. The bones are from Dave and Joan’s property, likely a combination of coyote and maybe coyote prey. It was a lot of fun working together on this while growing and displaying of the giants.

While putting the display together I remembered something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, make a scarecrow from clay pots. I have hundreds of clay pots, so plenty to work with. As with many other projects, I found the picture of what I wanted on the internet and then asked my husband to build it.

Does this make you hungry for pumpkin pie? These guys won’t do it. We’ll have an outside celebration with pumpkin pie, but not from these pumpkins. It’s like a lot of things in nature. The giants are not for cooking. They have a very thick skin or rind. But we will have a pumpkin pie together, distanced outside, a little whip cream, and a toast to a very successful pumpkin-growing experiment!

Looking forward, someday before Christmas we must retire the pumpkins, harvest the seeds and return 3000 lb of pumpkins to??? Compost??? We’ve also heard that a herd of cattle in the neighborhood might enjoy them!

Lastly we’ll put the seeds away in a dark drawer and let them rest up over the winter to bring us more fun next year.