Pumpkin Picking
It’s pumpkin picking time! Those crazy squashes are ripening and ready to be taken home, carved into fantastic shapes, and lit on Halloween night.
Holiday rituals are often things one eagerly anticipates all year long, even if they’re silly things like finding the first crocus in your yard or hanging a Christmas wreath on the front door. Or, for Halloween, carving an odd face onto a pumpkin and toasting the seeds to eat later.
While the supermarket will be an easy place to find a holiday pumpkin, going to a pumpkin patch is a lot more entertaining. Pumpkins come in all different sorts of sizes, shapes, and colors these days. You can wander through the patch and find the standard round orange ones, but you can also find white, yellow, red, and green. Searching through the patch for just the right color and shape (and weight!) for your idea of the perfect pumpkin is part of the holiday fun.
The pumpkin patch we like visiting is Relleke’s Pumpkin Patch in Granite City, Illinois, which is about one mile north of Cahokia Mounds. The pumpkin patch folk give you a tool to cut your choice off the vine and a wheelbarrow to cart it back in. Then you take off through the patch and search for that special pumpkin.
Meanwhile, on weekends, they also have vendors selling food and various craft items, which can make your pumpkin picking excursion even more enjoyable.
To find pumpkin patches near you, check the events section of your local paper or try searching online.
Once you get your pumpkin home, put it outside as decoration, but don’t carve it too early! Once you open your pumpkin up, it won’t take long for it to rot, so carving should take place as close to Halloween as possible. These days, while you can still use the standard paring knife, you can also buy pumpkin carving tools that will help you make more artistic faces. And for the power tool users who wouldn’t dream of doing any chore without a drill, you can also get drill attachments to help you carve and clean out the pumpkin.
Once you’ve created your masterpiece, it’s time to light it from the inside, put it in front of your house, and enjoy!
Have a wonderful Halloween!
Oh, hey, how do you fix a broken jack o’lantern? With a pumpkin patch, of course!
Copyright . Published 1 October 2007 in The Zone.
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