pumpkins

I did buy a few small ornamental pumpkins to decorate indoors, and one bigger one for the kids to carve, but otherwise we grew our own pumpkins this year.

We planted some small sugar pumpkins in the kids' garden.

And we planted some white pumpkins in our big garden.

What we did NOT intentionally plant, were these hubbard squash...

...or these big, fat zucchini-looking squash. We picked about a dozen of these things thinking they were zucchini that grew really fat and really fast.

Finally we decided to just leave the rest and see what happened. Some of them were turning orange, so I thought maybe they were some strange breed of pumpkin...

Zucchini definitely doesn't look like this.

From the kids' garden, we got a small crop of sugar pumpkins, along with two of our neighbors pumpkins which grew on our side (don't worry, they know --- some of our pumpkins were growing on their side of the fence, so we both decided to just keep whatever was on our own side).

These pumpkins were carved by Matt and his friend Paige one night.

And these were done by the boys (store-bought on the left, grown by Shad's parents on the right--thanks again).

Graham's is on the left, carved exactly how he drew the face. Drake's is on the right, modified slightly because the face he drew was way too small to carve.

I was just excited that Graham had drawn a face. I didn't know he had it in him.

I used most of the pumpkins to decorate outside.

These small ones were just the right size for the ledge outside the window (I got the idea from Matt).

[View from inside]

And I really like how the long pumpkins (I'm pretty sure that's what they are) add some variety to the mix.

We had plenty of pumpkins to put on the back patio as well. Shad and Matt used a whole bunch of the fat-squash/long-pumpkins as target practice one day, so there used to be a lot more.

But we still had plenty. Maybe I'll try even more varieties next year.

Yeah for pumpkins.