(Almost) everyone loves pumpkin

I don't grow pumpkins but we always purchase one to decorate our front yard in the fall.  When Thanksgiving rolls around, my grandchildren help me smash the pumpkin on the driveway so we can use it for our holiday feast.

This year's pumpkin was huge.  I roasted two cups of pumpkin seeds and froze 15 cups of pumpkin puree to make pies for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

I've read that pumpkin is a good food source for our sulcata tortoise so I set some aside for Mordecai.  He "said" it tastes fabulous.

I've also read that horses enjoy raw pumpkin as a treat so my granddaughter, Olivia, and I took some chunks of pumpkin to the barn for Lily.  Lily took one bite and spit it out on the ground.  The other horses more than happy to eat her pumpkin.

I made two big pumpkin pies for our Thanksgiving feast today.  The humans in our family will heap on the whipped cream and make short work of devouring them.

There is nothing more fun than a good pumpkin!

Tropical sunset

Just when fall was beginning to fade,  the gloxinia on my back deck burst into brilliant orange.  I have two pots of gloxinia given to me by two different friends.  They require consistent watering all summer long and I sometimes wonder if these little nondescript plants are worth the effort.   However, when those cold, damp, dreary days of late autumn started to feel a little depressing, the almost neon orange blaze of these blossoms made my day.

It took some research to discover that my gloxinia are a variety that is well named as Bolivian Sunset!   While it is definitely an exotic tropical, some growers claim that with good mulch, these plants function well as perennials in Zone 8.   This spring, I plan to divide one of my pots in order to plant some of it in the ground (in a location close to my hose, of course).  They claim that given the opportunity to spread its roots in the ground, the blooms are so dense that they hide the foliage. 

Meanwhile, I've carried my little tropical sunset indoors to enjoy.

The boys love turnip greens

I've been told that its important to harvest turnip greens before a frost so that they don't turn bitter.  Not being a native to the south, I have never developed a taste for them.  However, two of the men in our house love them dearly.  Bob likes his boiled up in a big pot with lots of bacon.  Mordecai the sulcata tortoise, likes his raw.  It would be hard to say which one enjoys his greens more.

Perfect timing

Everyone knows that a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich created with tomatoes still warm from the sun and crispy lettuce cut straight from the garden tastes like a little bit of heaven.  Sadly, in my corner of the world, this heavenly experience is just not possible.  The best tomatoes  ripen during the early summer and lettuce can only be grown in the fall and winter.   Because these two crops don't grow together in my backyard, I've just never bothered to grow lettuce in my fall garden.

However, I was give some lettuce seeds this summer so I just tossed them out to see what would happen.   Only three plants managed to survive my casual planting, but boy, oh boy!   I was able to harvest the first lettuce cutting and the last tomatoes on the same day.

Those BLTs were the best ones we have ever tasted at our house!  Heaven can happen on earth.