Who says you can't have fun with your food storage?

Long before I considered using the pumpkins in our garden as a food source, my husband planted them, like he has for years, to be jack-o-lanterns for our children. Our pumpkins this year turned out to be our most successful crop, and before I start trying to harvest them for food, they are serving their original purpose. Last night the kids drew the pictures they wanted on their pumpkins, and my husband carved them up.


Turns out I was pretty much accurate when I dubbed one of the pumpkins "gargantua" in a previous post. My husband weighed "gargantua", and it weighed 62 lbs! Here is "gargantua" in its "fun" form:



I had a special request from one of my children to specifically include a picture of this pumpkin, called (I hope I get this right, or I'll have to change it later) "Teen":



So, just a couple of our examples of "food storage fun." As you probably noticed in at least one of these photos, some of our pumpkins are still at least a little green. That doesn't bother the children when they are decorating, but I'm going to have to figure out how much you can salvage from the green parts of a carved-up pumpkin. There were also a few hungry somethings underneath the pumpkins that left little marks of their passing, but I have not yet seen how far they got in or how much damage was done beyond the immediate outer skin. I figure I have time to do that after tomorrow night. I hope everything's salvageable--62 lbs is a lot of pumpkin, and besides the multiple pumpkins carved, there are some still in the garden. I figure a garden is an extremely valuable example of continual food storage--having fun with the harvest is just an added benefit... :)