Thursday, October 30, 2008

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... :)

6 comments:

The Scavenger said...

62 pounder!!! Now that's a big pumpkin. They look great.

Did you ever get your firewood??
How's the stove working for you??

Chris

Marie said...

Chris--It's hard to take a picture of the big one in such a way that you can tell how big it really is, at least for me. We are pretty happy with it. :)
We haven't heard from the aspen guy, but we are still looking for some hard wood, rather than the pine. We haven't had the chance to use the stove very much yet, but when we have, it has been great--we still have some wood from our tree to use, and it has worked out well. Thanks for your comment!

Anonymous said...

We had enough pumpkins this year to carve a couple( since it is just the 2 of us, Sure miss the grand kids) and "gut" a bunch for freezing and for the first time canned some. I did cook the guts down some and drained off alot of water. Canned while the stuff was still hot and used the hot water method instead of the preasure cooker. We did 7 quarts which to my way of thinking is enough for 14 pies through the coming year.

Carl In wisconsin, where it is supposed to be 65 today...Amazing

Marie said...

Wow! That's a great harvest! If I can figure out the whole process, I'll probably freeze the results this year. I'm most looking forward to getting some pumpkin soup out of it... :) Thanks for your comment!

LJ said...

Marie: it's me. Link away, I promise you I don't mind.

Marie said...

LJ--thanks so much--I plan to reprint your story with a link to you in my next post on pumpkins--I really appreciate it!