Ghost Upon the Floor

     Autumn brings many things. The colors of the world explode into vibrant beauty, the nights chill, dim, and the world swells with feasts of beauty—bright pumpkins and corn and apples and cider and spice and pies.

     This year’s harvest brought something new for What a Witch. The harvest’s beauty brought a little baby pumpkin. The new addition has us looking at our favorite season from a different perspective—one we have not looked from in some time. One of innocence.

     For What a Witch, gone are the days of blood, guts, and gore. Now the Halloween holiday is filled with cute pumpkins, sweet treats and pajamas with dinosaur feet, and chubby cartoon ghosts. What goes bump in the night, and haunts All Hallow’s Eve, is taking on a more family-friendly air.

     We’ve had the joy of introducing some of the autumn season’s magical things to our little pumpkin. A walk through the cemetery on a sunny day, the smell of mums in the peak or their blossom (did  you know mums have smell?); the sound of rustling leaves. The morning we took our walk, child and stroller in tow, was bright and warm. Fall was just beginning to peak out at us—in the flowering mums planted in 100 year old urns, in the deep red just beginning to seep into the trees. There was something so peaceful and sacred in walking around with the little one, passing beneath trees, seeing the lakes and the spiders spinning their webs. Reading names from stones, remembering if only for a moment the people who have come to rest in the cemetery, walking silently through the Chapel deep within the cemetery.

     The next week we took the little pumpkin to meet the great pumpkin, to a local pumpkin patch. On a Sunday morning in the later fall, at a farm in the country where goats ran free and horses watched from the barn, we took a horse-drawn wagon ride over the farm and to the pumpkin patch; a gray but nevertheless beautiful fall day. Pumpkins lay scattered on the ground, their vines twisting from the earth, and here and there were pumpkin guts and seeds from those gourds which fared less fortunately.

     Welcome, October. We turn around, and it is gone. A world of winters, cold, shovels and snow, quickly becomes life. Turn around, and the spring has broken, when the world rains on muddy ground and the first seeds begin to grow. The sun shines brighter, and longer, and the world opens into summer. In summer, the autumn seems like a long ago dream. And then we turn around, and it's here.

      It is with some sorrow that I annouce the passing of one of my two pumpkins. The first one which started to grow I soon came to find, after harvesting, had likely been left on the vine too long. My pumpkin had started to rot from the inside. What had once been firm and strong started to soften and cave in from the top. Next year, if I have any pumpkins, I will be sure not to leave them on the vine too long.

 Without researching online whether or not the seeds of a rotting pumpkin could keep, or be roasted, I decided to try and save the seeds anyway. I cut into the soft pumpkin skin and removed all the pumpkin, as much of the seeds as I could, and submerged the pumpkin in water to separate the seeds. It remains to be seen how they will turn out.

 Before throwing away the pieces of rotted pumpkin, I did the pumpkin right and cut a face into one of the firmer pieces. All this work, all the planting and watering and weeding and tending to harvest the thing-- all to cut into it for seeds and a face.

 In happier pumpkin growing related news, I have a third-- smaller, but very strong-- pumpkin still mostly green, but soon ready to harvest. I had not placed much faith in this third pumpkin; however, the plant I believe will soon prove me very wrong.

 October, finally, in all its leaf falling, burning red, cool nights of glory, is here. At once, the joy of knowing that it is the most wonderful time of the year, and the panic that sets in knowing that never, whatever I do, will it be enough.

 This year I have something different, however. My efforts caused these pumpkins to grow. I can now say that I have grown pumpkins-- only two, but two nonetheless, and two bright, round, beautiful orange pumpkins I could not be more proud of.

 I bought the plants this spring, from a local herb and plant farm, grown organically. I wasn't even sure at the time if I would find or have a place to plant them in, let alone if they would grow. I did, and grew they did. With some love, care and a lot of rain that I am sure did not hurt things.


 What better way may there be to start off October, than a harvest of pumpkins?






 Should you be as fortunate to make it as far as I did in the pumpkin growing experience, I found this video from the University of Maine helpful in the harvest.

 A brief post. This weekend, I will be off in Sleepy Hollow, NY, for the first time in my life. I could not be looking forward to getting there more, and I do plan on blogging as much as I can while I am there. If, for some very possible reason, I don't get to blog while there, I know I will have a photo or two to blog about when I get home.

 This here pumpkin is the first I've bought this season. None of the pie pumpkins or jack o'lanterns I tried growing in the yard made it, and so I have broken down and begun buying pumpkins which seem to be good carving candidates. I have a few ideas what this may become.

For the last few years, I've done some major carving projects, but only one or two a year, and always on Beggar's Night and Halloween itself. My goal this year is to start carving them earlier-- but not too early-- this year. Perhaps next weekend?

 It's here. Finally. I watched it coming for weeks it seems, the first leaves starting to burst with darkening color, the pumpkins starting into stores. But. It never truly hits like the calendar turning over to October 1st. 

Someday, I will grown a pumpkin. I've chronicled my past disappointments here, to varying degrees- my failure to be able to grow a pumpkin plant into a fully functioning and healthy being, capable of producing pumpkins. I don't believe I wrote about the extent of last year's failure-- nearly all of my many plants passing on to the next world before they even had a chance to flower.

 Needless to say, this year has been better. My Jack O'Lantern pumpkins I had so wanted to grow and carve did not survive. Several of the plants I bought at a local farmer's market-- pie pumpkins-- have been beacons of hope. They have flowered, and closed; flowered, and closed-- and I so hope they produce fruit.

 The record-setting drought we have had-- which I recently wrote about as it threatened the process of leaves changing in the fall-- I thought alone would have killed my pumpkins. But I have been giving the plants much water each day, and now am regularly spraying for bugs-- as I lost a plant early on to some evil creature which ate the plant whole, it seemed. Also, the location I planted these in, I know, are not ideal-- but they have nevertheless progressed farther than I have ever made it before.

 Here's to something of a crop, I hope, in time for fall.

One may think that people who live the season would feel more ready for October to be here.

But, as always. I feel behind and running out of time and almost panicked-- and yet, so, so, so happy that October is finally here. Creeping up, seemingly out of nowhere, with the speed of this video of a time-lapsed pumpkin's growth.

 Must start decorating today. No time to lose.


 

First pumpkin, 2011

My pumpkin patch is continuing to bloom. The patch continues to spread outward, and vine both out and up. Flowers are blooming everywhere. This weekend I am going to build a shelter for the top, to protect the patch from too much sunlight.