Happy Halloween!

There is nothing more fun than growing your own pumpkin patch. When I was growing up we always had a huge display of jack-o-lanterns all from pumpkins grown in our backyard garden. The neighbor kids would come over, we would all pick out some pumpkins from the garden to carve and we would have a big ol' pumpkin carving party. Sometimes drills and saws were required for the big 100 lb'ers and that was the biggest blast! Power tools, wheeee!

This is the first year I have had enough space to grow pumpkins in a long time, not to mention the freedom from those dreaded squash bugs. The garden produced several pumpkins this year even though I got the seeds in a little bit late. Here's the harvested haul. As you can see, some didn't quite ripen up, but that's OK. There's always something fun to create with a green pumpkin:

Here most of them are all carved up. There were 13 in total (perfect Halloween number!) and it took 2 days to carve them all. This is what was created on day 1. Most were original creations, the two on the left were from printable templates:

 

 

The kid created this nifty 4-sider:

 

 

 

This guy requires an up-close shot since it's hard to see his gourd-impaled head in the dark shot. The kid stated that 'that gourd must have had some pretty good momentum to get stuck in his head like that'.:

 



 

Here they are on the porch:

 

 





Day 2 the last few were carved up. A cat from a template, but we added a moon and stars:

 

It really comes alive when all lit up:

 



 

 

And a zombie pumpkin with a cauliflower brain. An old wire hanger cut into pieces was used to secure the top pumpkin and the brain in place. Red food coloring and pumpkin guts provided the bloody effect:

 

 

All lit up:

 



 

Happy Halloween everyone!