The default plan for a pumpkin is to carve it on the 30th and throw it out on the 2nd. It is a good evening. It is also the shortest possible use of something that will happily sit on a porch for two months and produce next year's crop besides.
Here is what else there is, roughly in the order the season offers it.
September: put them where they will be used
Children are far more interested in pumpkins they had a hand in placing. If a display is going up, let them decide which pumpkin goes on which step. It takes ten minutes and changes how they see the porch for two months.
The other early job: give each pumpkin a name and write it somewhere. This sounds like a small thing. It reliably becomes the running joke of the autumn, and it makes the November check-ins ("how's Gerald doing?") something the whole house takes part in.
October: decorate without a knife
Carving ends a pumpkin. The cut surface starts decomposing immediately, and a carved pumpkin is done in three to five days. Everything below leaves it whole, which means it survives the season.
- Painting. Acrylic on a clean, dry pumpkin, no primer needed. White pumpkins are the best canvas by a distance. Worth knowing: a painted pumpkin is no longer food, so paint the field pumpkins and leave the cheese pumpkins alone.
- Drawing on with a marker. Faster, less mess, and for small children the result is closer to what they pictured than paint usually is.
- Pushpins and map tacks. Brass tacks pushed into a pumpkin in patterns catch the light beautifully, and the punctures are shallow enough that the pumpkin keeps.
- Etching. Scratching through the skin with a lino tool or a sturdy spoon handle, without cutting into the wall, gives a two-tone design. It is the one technique that gets close to the drama of carving without the three-day lifespan.
October: the games
Pumpkins are heavy, roll badly and make a satisfying noise, which is most of what a game needs.
- Pumpkin bowling. A small round pumpkin, ten plastic bottles, a driveway. The wobble is the point.
- Ring toss. Stems make excellent targets. Rope rings, or embroidery hoops.
- Guess the weight. Everyone writes a number, then a bathroom scale settles it. Reliably contentious.
- Counting the seeds. Genuinely educational, and the answer (usually 300 to 500 in a decent-sized pumpkin) surprises adults more than children.
Any time: save the seeds and grow next year
This is the one that turns a season into a cycle, and it is easier than people assume.
Take seeds from an heirloom pumpkin. Open-pollinated varieties come back more or less true to type, while a hybrid will give you something unpredictable. Rinse the flesh off, spread them in a single layer on a plate or a screen, and leave them somewhere dry and out of the sun for about a week, until a seed snaps rather than bends. Store in a paper envelope, labeled with the variety and the year, somewhere cool.
Sow them after the last frost, late May here. Pumpkins want a great deal of room, full sun and more water than you expect. A single plant will take over an unreasonable amount of a garden, which children find hilarious and gardeners find less so.
One caveat worth being honest about: pumpkins cross-pollinate freely. If your neighbours grow squash, saved seed may give you something nobody has ever seen before. This is either the flaw in the plan or the best part of it.
November: the ending
A display does not have to be swept away on the 1st. A whole, uncarved pumpkin often still looks right long after the last trick-or-treater, and how long it holds is weather and luck rather than a promise anybody can make. One thing worth saying plainly: a porch display is decorative. It has spent weeks outdoors on a front step, and it is not food.
When it is time:
- Compost the rest. Pumpkins break down fast and are excellent compost. Break them open first, or they take months.
- Feed them out. Chickens, pigs and goats are enthusiastic; check with anyone local who keeps them. Do not leave pumpkins out for wildlife near a road, which draws deer into traffic.
- Make a bird feeder. Halve one, scoop it, fill with seed, hang it with twine. It lasts about a two weeks and is the last useful week of a pumpkin's life.
What none of them should be is a trash bag on the 2nd of November. A pumpkin that has been chosen, placed, named, painted, photographed, cooked and finally composted has had a considerably better run than most things you buy in September.