Pumpkin carving 2020

Happy Halloween!

Another Halloween has rolled round and with it the excuse to carve another pumpkin. This year little one asked for Octonauts. Yes plural. I really should have pinned her down to a single one but she found it hard to choose. I then made the mistake of buying a very large pumpkin. Yup, I’m afraid, as usual, I didn’t grow this one. I still can’t justify giving so much space to a huge pumpkin vine in the garden for the sake of a tasteless £1 Halloween pumpkin. Yes, granted, I could plant a carvable pumpkin that tastes good too but I like to stick to red kuri pumpkins. These taste great and can be trained vertically to save space.

Anyway, a big pumpkin just made the temptation to do something challenging too hard to resist. so here it is, this years Halloween pumpkin.

This is little one’s pumpkin. She drew her design on the pumpkin in biro. I then cut the outline of her shapes with the Thai carving knife. She then gouged out most of her bits with a little carving tool. I kid you not. That was the scariest 20 minutes of my Halloween. I just hovered around her both hands ready to grab, rearranging her hands so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

Last year’s pumpkin carving post goes into more detail about how it was done. This year there are just a few photos from the process, which you may not be surprised to know, took a friggin’ long time. So long that in the end I couldn’t be bothered to try and cook something out of the bland insides this year.

Here it is in the light with some creepy veg that we DID grow in the garden. The carrots grew like this because I added too much fertiliser to the pot. The pumpkin munchkins grew like this, I think, because the young fruit had been pierced by the berry pirates (aka Southern shield bug).