It's the Dead Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

The Pumpkin Graveyard

I was looking at the pile of rotting jack-o-lanterns in my compost pile and reflecting on how we have a whole industry of growing a vegetable that few Americans, if any, actually eat. Every October piles of pumpkins appear in all of the grocery stores, produce markets etc. We buy them, cut the tops off, scrape out the seeds and other goop from the inside, carve scary faces or other patterns into them and then put them on the front porch with a candle inside. Only the more ambitious among us might bake and eat the seeds or otherwise try to turn some of this poor humiliated vegetable into food.


There is, of course, the matter of pumpkin pie. I am not sure where pumpkin pie filling comes from, other than a can that you buy at the grocery store. I don't recall ever seeing anyone I know turn an actual pumpkin into pumpkin pie. Maybe when your jack-o-lantern disappears from your front porch late at night on October 31 it's actually not the doing of those pesky teenagers from down the street, but rather the work of the Secret Pumpkin Recycling Mafia, sent out by the likes of Dell and Libby's to collect the ingredients that will become this Thanksgiving's pumpkin pies. Who knows? I sure don't, but since I never liked the stuff anyway I'm not going to waste another thought on it.


Our pumpkins end up in the compost pile after they have completed their service on Halloween night, so I guess in the end we do eat them, at least indirectly, since the compost gets worked into the soil in the garden and then we grow food in it. I love my compost pile. It's an opportunity for me to manufacture my own dirt. You can never have enough dirt.


I made this dirt myself!

I'm especially proud of my three-chamber compost thingy that gives me plenty of space in which to regularly shift the compost material back and forth between chambers so that it breaks down in a nice even way. I put in all of the non-meat kitchen scraps, but the main ingredients are lawn clippings mixed with leaves. Every fall I collect the leaves that rain down from the many trees on and around our lawn, run over them with a lawnmower and then dump them into a pile. Over the course of the following summer I draw down the pile of processed leaves as I mix them with lawn clippings. It takes a few months for a batch to break down enough to be usable, at which point I pack it into big heavy-duty trash bags for storage until I can work it into the soil at the beginning of the next growing season.

Where Dirt Comes From

This past summer I actually ran out of leaves while I still had plenty of lawn left to mow, so this year I asked one of my neighbors for some of his leaves in order to have enough next year. He was a little perplexed at this because for most people in our leafy suburb, the question is, "How do I get rid of all these damned leaves?" and not, "Where can I get more?" So he asked what I wanted them for and I told him I was planning to eat them, which, as noted previously, is at least indirectly true. He gave me a bunch of leaves but he didn't ask any further questions.


But I digress… this is about pumpkins and not compost. I'll tell you more about that some other time.


My Favorite Wife, who grew up in Germany, is a devoted pumpkin carver, having adopted this peculiarly American custom with the zeal that is generally only observed in late converts to a cause. She has presumably amassed a huge collection of little knives and saws and other specialized pumpkin carving tools; I say presumably because nobody can ever remember where the little tools we bought the previous year are, so off we go to Walgreens every year to get more. I assume the missing tools are in the same place as all of the left-over Easter egg coloring equipment that we also can't seem to find from one year to the next. Maybe all of those missing socks that seem to have never returned from their journey to the dryer and back are there too.


The practice of pumpkin carving was actually brought into the family by me, then an American expatriate in Germany, when my daughter was small and needed to be introduced to Proper Culture. They don't grow pumpkins in Germany, but there are some fairly large yellow-orange squash that show up in the stores in the fall and make a pretty reasonable pumpkin substitute. So one year I bought one and showed my daughter how to make a jack-o-lantern. Then we put it on the front porch of our ground-floor apartment for the admiration and wonderment of the many neighbors in our apartment complex. It wasn't long before we had a whole phalanx of little neighbor kids and their parents showing up every evening at dusk to witness the lighting of the Kürbisgeist, or "squash ghost".

Vegetables of our Forefathers