Pumpkin Eaters
Move over, Peter. You’re not the only pumpkin fan in town.
This autumn, who doesn’t love a pumpkin? They’re round. They’re goofy. And they’re just so, well, happily, heartily and—most importantly—hugely orange.
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Canadians, in fact, are wild about the domestic vegetable. According to Statistics Canada, pumpkins were the fastest growing crop of 2007. The area planted with pumpkins, squash and zucchini increased more than twofold between 1986 and 2001. Pumpkins are now the seventh most important vegetable after potatoes, sweet corn, peas, beans, tomatoes and carrots. Most of these are grown in Southern Ontario, the Montérégie region of Quebec and British Columbia.
But here’s the surprise, only eight percent of those pumpkins were used for processing
into food (canned pumpkin, for example). The rest were sold fresh. Not only to food-obsessed
gourmets boiling down vats of pumpkins for homemade, organic, slow-cooked pies.
But to regular old everyday Canadians who simply get a kick out of pumpkins. Pumpkin
lovers, one might call them. Or pumpkin adorers.
There’s a lot you can do with a pumpkin, it turns out, a lot that makes the vegetable….well…just
plain more human. You can carve it into a jack-o-lantern. You can paint a face on
it and use it for a scarecrow. And if you’ve got a garden, you can raise a healthy,
well-adjusted, generous pumpkin—a pumpkin that never worries about body image, a
pumpkin that celebrates its largess without a single concern about heart disease
or diabetes or summer bikinis.
If big is beautiful, very, very, very big is even more beautiful, when it comes
to pumpkins, that is. All across the country, folks are raising plump, plumper and
plumpest pumpkins to compete in autumn pumpkin Weigh Offs—the vegetable equivalent
of the Biggest Gainer.
This year a new national record was set by Jane and Phil Hunt of Port Elgin, Ontario, who raised a 1,678-pound specimen and entered it in the Port Elgin Pumpkinfest,
where it took first place. (www.pumpkinfest.org).
“I just kept hoping they would say 1,400 and when they said 1,600 pounds, I was
shocked, totally shocked,” said Hunt.
With joy, that is.
The meat from these large lovelies is stringy and not especially good for baking.
Nevertheless, they remain superficially, even vainly beautiful—and a great food
item to keep around while watching your weight. Cut a few raw hunks of a giant pumpkin
and gnaw on them while you’re zoning out with the TV. It tastes terrible. You’ll never
be tempted to snack on fatty, full-of-herself pumpkin again.
Trying to pack on the pounds, takes on a whole new meaning when you’re raising
pumpkins. You need soil rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, as well as minor
nutrients like calcium and magnesium. You need compost and manure for fertilising.
Then you’ve got to sow the seeds, transplant the seedlings, create a mini-green
house with plastic sheeting to protect them, pollinate the flowers, figure out
which pumpkin is most likely to break the scales and give it room to grow.
All of which seems like a lot of work. Our advice? Head to your nearest pumpkin
patch (check for locations at (www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/canada.htm).
Most let you choose between picking your own pumpkin off the vine and selecting
one from a roadside stand, as well as offer an assortment of other attractions like
corn mazes and hay rides.
But don’t be distracted. There’s a pumpkin out there waiting to be anthropomorphised by you in your very own home. At the Chilliwack Pumpkin Patch (http://www.chilliwackcornmaze.com), in British Columbia, they sell petit pumpkins, pumpkins with wrinkles and pumpkins with green tints to their skin. If none of these physical traits sound appealing, you can go for an otherworldly beauty, the ghost pumpkin. “She’s flat, soft and white,” says owner Wendy Taekema.
Looking for a trendier pumpkin? Try Abby Lane Farm (www.abbylanefarm.com),
also in BC, which follows organic growing practices. “We have sugar pumpkins that
are sweet and good for cooking,” says owner Catherine Young. “And jack-o-lantern
pumpkins in the field that grow as big as 60 pounds.” But her cream-of-the-literal-crop
is her selection of 300-pound beauties, priced at 20 cents a pound. “People snatch
those up quickly,” says Young. “So you have to hurry.”
Perhaps we Canadians need to rethink our pumpkin love. There are squashes out
there that need attention. And gourds. And Chia Pets. Not even Americans appear
to share the same vegetable reverence. In Mountain Vernon, Washington, teams use
a medieval catapult called a trebuchet to launch their pumpkins 3,000 feet into
the sky—whereupon they fall back to earth, smashing open on the ground (www.festivalofpumpkins.org).
Hhm…this was the country that recently blasted a hole in the moon.
Then again, as famed pumpkin philosopher Linus said in his Snoopy television
special, “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion,
politics and the Great Pumpkin.” The Great Pumpkin being the large, luminescent
pumpkin that was supposed to appear in the sky on Halloween night, giving presents
to all those who waited for it, all those who believed.
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