The last couple of months, pumpkins have featured large in my life. I help out at an organic vege patch on a Saturday as a volunteer and, a few weeks ago, the pumpkins had to be picked because the frost had begun to wither the vines.
A team of cheerful people with a ute gathered up the pumpkins - took them from their beds and lined them up on another old bed base...there must have been hundreds of them! But now, what to do with them? Especially in an area where everyone has pumpkins and honesty boxes on the side of the road.
Well, we have managed to move a lot of them - every week you take a pumpkin home as a matter of course. Baked pumpkin, pumpkin soup, pumpkin chips - even pumpkin muffins...you name it we've eaten it with pumpkin! The honesty box idea has worked well too on the property we are situated in - people coming to meetings, workshops, working bees and so on have been buying them and no doubt adding to the vast store of pumpkin recipes which must be accumulating in the universe!
To tell you the truth - I haven't got all 'pumpkinned out' yet. (Though my attempt at 'pumpkin custard' doesn't bear repeating) But last weekend, we decided to make an extra effort to move some of the remaining 50 or so.
A group of women we knew were fund-raising with a night at the local amateur theatre's production of Neil Simon's
The Odd Couple. There were going to be raffles and art auctions...so we snuck in too - with, you guessed it - pumpkins. But these were no ordinary pumpkins. Two of us spent the spare hours of our week painting, primping and dressing...transforming pumpkins into characters - pairs of
Odd Couples!
I must admit I got very attached to the ones I created. But they
did go to good homes - people really appreciated our efforts with these 'dressed pumpkins' and we got to sell a whole lot of 'naked' ones as well.
So once more, we kept the fun in fund-raising. I think the pictures in the next blog will speak for themselves!
PS: Miss Piggy Pumpkin's still got tickets on herself!
