Harvested Pumpkins

I know that the blog has been quiet, but I've been busy......doctor appointments  (just checkups, nothing special wrong with us), hearing test, spay/neuter clinics, picking up building supplies, etc. It takes up an entire day just to get one of these things accomplished. Such is one of the downsides of living rural where it takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours to get to "civilization".  But there's no way I want to move to make those trips shorter. I like it where I am right now.

Now for those pumpkins....... I didn't intentionally plant these this year. I had thrown a number of ruined pumpkins from my landrace varieties into the chicken pens. I guess the birds either didn't eat some of the seeds, or the seeds passed through some of the hens unharmed. So some seeds ended up in the pen litter, which I often use as a top dressing for certain crops. In this case, it was the lilikoi vines. Several pumpkin plants volunteered in the lilikoi area. The past couple in months I've been harvesting a number of pumpkins off them. 

As is typical of my landrace pumpkins, the come in various sizes and shapes. All are generally small, and generally roundish. They all mature out to an orange rind if I let sit long enough. By the time they have become orange on the outside, they are strong orange colored on the inside and quite sweet & flavorful. 

Freshly harvested ones on the left. Ready to eat ones on the right. 

I tend to harvest them fairly green, but I wait until the lighter areas on the rind turn from green to light cream. If I let them stay on the vine any longer the mice and rats eat them. It only takes 1 or 2 nights for the little critters to hollow them out.  Learned the hard way to get those pumpkins picked on time, otherwise I harvest nothing but rind. 

I just cut open one of the pumpkins and plan to make a pumpkin/coconut soup. And of course I'll be saving the seeds in order to replant more pumpkins. 

Nicely orange interior. And not too seedy. 

By the way, the reason I grow these landrace pumpkins rather than varieties from the seed catalogs is that this landrace has resistance to the pickleworm moth, squash stem borer, and powdery mildew. For me, that's great news! I've not yet found a seed catalog variety that can do that.