Good morning Saturday Morning Garden Blog-Friends! This cheerful tradition appears every Saturday morning at 9am Eastern, and lasts into the week as conversations percolate. Pull up a chair, snag a piece of pumpkin pie, let’s chat!
Though it’s hard to believe, here we are at the weekend before Thanksgiving — frosty pumpkin season for sure! The diary takes its title from a poem by James Whitcomb Riley in which a farmer revels in the early-morning autumn sounds:
O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best,
With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
I have an urban yard and no livestock, and I don’t even grow pumpkins, but I sure do have some frosty-punkin reflections to share!
For me as a kid in Kansas, pumpkins were mostly about jack-o-lanterns, but we bought the pumpkin for carving at the store, rather than growing them or visiting a commercial pumpkin patch. Mr. AnnieJo remembers a similar vibe from his Chicago childhood.
We never attempted to grow them in our own garden either. We did a couple of years with butternut squash, but decided that it took up too much space for the level of reward, plus we wanted to prioritize two other vine-habit plantings: cucumbers and muskmelons. But, oh, there was a new tradition in Wisconsin for bringing up the kids: the commercial pick-your-own pumpkin patch!
Sometimes the weather was puffy-coat cold, sometimes the weather was short-sleeve warm, but always a thrill.
The fate of these pumpkins was invariably a good old-fashioned carving. Peak jack-o-lantern carving, I’ve found, is a day or two before Halloween so that the carving doesn’t rot or sag too much before it has to welcome any trick-or-treaters that might come.
Pulling out the pumpkin-guts is always a stringy, slimy affair. It helped for me as a child to have the seeds be part of the goal, in the form of oven-roasted pumpkin seeds. Alas, I don’t think we ever got it JUST right, though we tried various iterations of oils and surfaces and seasonings. The pumpkin seeds always were just a little tougher than they should have been in my imaginings. Does anyone have THE perfect recipe?
We did our share of faces, but I always had a soft spot for other designs. The snowy trees and cat below were one such alternative:
This year, I tried something different with the carving, based on a freaky Facebook meme:
I got out my trusty drill… scroll down for the sequence!
Well, that was it for Halloween. But here we are with Thanksgiving week before us, so pumpkins are still relevant for a bit longer — as uncarved decorations with cornstalks, and as foodstuffs.
Did you know that 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, otherwise known as the PSL? NPR marked the occasion with a piece on “It’s Been a Minute” called Twenty Years of Pumpkin Spice Power (though the HTML title for the segment had a more provocative title, “How did the PSL become shorthand for whiteness?”) Indeed, as pointed out in The Guardian last year, pumpkin spice is a determinedly North American thing. There are regional boundaries as well. I’ve been in Wisconsin for the entire duration of the pumpkin spice craze, and a map-graphic in the article based on Instacart purchases shows that Wisconsin is one of the pumpkin-spiciest among the states. Strangely, pumpkin spice has at least some degree of separation from pumpkin itself. Many of the pumpkin-spice products don’t actually have any pumpkin flavor/odor at all, just the spice-combination that has such a nostalgic hold on North Americans, particularly those of European descent. Depending on which web page you consult, pumpkin pie spice can include cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, allspice.
My go-to pumpkin spice combination is cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. And in our household, pumpkin spice (in the form of pumpkin pie filling) is not just an autumn thing, but a school year lunchbox staple for younger-daughter. We use the recipe from the Libby’s can; a large-can recipe makes 2 pies, we usually do a smaller can of off-brand pumpkin and make just one, in a Corningware container.
Libby’s Famous Pumpkin Pie
1 ½ c sugar
1 t salt
2 t cinnamon
1 t ginger
½ t cloves
4 large eggs
1 can (19 oz) pumpkin
2 cans (12 fl oz) evaporated milk
For my casserole, I bake for 55min at 360.
But for Thanksgiving, I roll out the crust as well as the pecan pies in addition to the pumpkin! Somehow we’ve fallen into a tradition in which I make two pies of each to take to the Thanksgiving extravaganza at Mr. AnnieJo’s sister’s place. There are always leftovers, which isn’t a bad thing!
OK, I’ve rambled enough. Now it’s your turn! What do you do with pumpkins? Are you in a new plant hardiness zone now? What do you do with Thanksgiving? What’s your position on pumpkin spice? (I tried to put in a poll, but it didn’t publish. Does SMGB not do polls?)
And, I can’t sign off without a shout-out to CWalter for taking my dare last week with the Best Diary Ever on Garden Delights of 2023. So I suppose this is now the Diary After the Best Diary Ever!