Pumpkins, squashes and gourds, oh my🎶🎃

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” Henry David Thoreau

It’s the great pumpkin season, Charlie Brown! Pumpkins, gourds or squash embody the spirit of autumn. We use them at Hallowe’en to carve and adorn our homes but am I the only one who starts to go pumpkin crazy in September? Judging by the number of pumpkin lattes, pumpkin muffins and pumpkin cheesecakes that are on the menus of all the famous fast food and coffee chains, I think not.

And so began my quest this last weekend to find my pumpkins. There didn’t seem to be any pumpkin patches nearby so I turned to the internet. In all of Alberta there were only four listed. This must be some kind of mistake! Maybe the local farmers do not have time to place their information on the electronic highway. I dragged Voldemort into the car and off we went in search. My brother-in-law who lives in a hamlet outside of Wetaskiwin dryly observed that pumpkins don’t grow well in Alberta because of the shorter growing season. I was not discouraged.

We drove to the famous Calgary Corn Maze which on the internet boasted of, among other things, jack-o-lantern pumpkins, cotton candy ghost white pumpkins, knucklehead pumpkins, red October pumpkins and, be still my pumpkin heart, Galeuse D’Eysine – pink skin coloured pumpkins with peanut like bumps. Surely this was the treasure trove I was looking for. We arrived a day early; apparently you can only purchase pumpkins on the weekends in Calgary. Suspiciously I looked around the Corn Maze. There was not one pumpkin to be seen. And although the internet boasted of a “pick your own” there was not a pumpkin patch in the nearby vicinity.

Skeptical that the mysterious pumpkins would arrive on the weekend, we headed back to Cochrane and went to the farmer’s market. My search netted one medium orange/green and warty pumpkin. Upon arriving home a little despondent, our neighbour Crystal commented that it was a pretty pumpkin and they had just had a shipment delivered where she worked. Quickly we hurried to No Frills and well, you can see for yourself, there be pumpkins my pretty……