Gardening with Gael - Variety the spice of pumpkin life

 

Pumpkins feature everywhere here in Connecticut at this time of the year. Most shops have displays outside with pumpkins of every size and inside, complementing their colour, beautiful chrysanthemums of every autumn shade. It is the build-up to Halloween. On the road to Long Island last week we passed fields of ‘pick your own’ pumpkins. The foliage had mostly dried up and massive (we are in America!) pumpkins lit-tered the ground. The predominant pumpkin here is orange skinned cucurbita pepo. Pumpkin originates from pepon, Greek for large melon. The French adapted it to pompom, the English to pumpion and then the American colonists changed it to pumpkin.

In the US pumpkins are generally eat-en as a sweet pumpkin pie – a traditional part of Thanksgiving. While we were in Boston with Jane she bought us deli-cious little sweet pumpkin muffins for breakfast. When we lived in the UK we discovered they are pig food and when a friend from the UK visited she could not believe we ate them. “What,” she said, “is this weird fascination you all have with pumpkin? Everywhere I go there is pumpkin soup on the menu, and, you ROAST it?!”

Europeans eat the flowers, seeds and flesh and so, increasingly do we. I am trying at the moment to perfect a Vogel-type bread for Nick and most of the recipes have lashings of pump-kin seeds. So far he could begin a wall out the back with my attempts although todays effort is quite edible.

I will arrive home just in time to plant pumpkins for the next season. Somewhere in a drawer there is an envelope with seeds I kept from a particularly creamy, bright orange pumpkin. I often have them growing out of the compost bin and randomly throughout the garden. This year I am going to follow the ad-vice I have gleaned from many sources.

Apparently pumpkins are hungry and thirsty. Ideally they prefer to be planted on little mounds of compost which keep the seeds warm and provide good drainage. In spite of their thirst they do not like soggy ground.

I have an area near my fig trees. They too like more food and drink than I have ever provided them with. The ground is downhill from a small tank of water I can use. An inch a week is sufficient. Once I have my little compost hills I will heavily mulch the area so the vines can spread. Male and female blos-soms appear on the plants and both need to be open to form fruit. The male is the more noticeable flower, blooms slightly above the plant with a long wiry stem that connects the blossom to the vine. They appear about two weeks before the female. The female flower has a shorter, thicker stalk lower in the plant among the leaves with a round swelling be-low the flower base. Once pollinated this swelling becomes the pumpkin.

Last year Trevor and Karen, who grow pumpkins for their stall at the Village Market on Saturday morning , had all sorts of cooking advice. On their recommendation I cut one of their beautiful pumpkins in half and removed the seeds. Into the hollows I put chunks of garlic and butter, then roasted the pumpkin till it was soft. The centre was scooped out and used for roast pumpkin soup. Absolutely delicious.

The fall magazines here are full of delectable recipes, at present most-ly featuring pumpkin, pumpkin bread, pumpkin tarts, pies, pumpkin bread pudding with citrus drizzle, and a twist on the jam roll, a pumpkin roll cake with a cream cheese filling. I will be bringing home the recipes.

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