Level One Pumpkin Latte

What is it about pumpkins that makes us personify and yet mutilate them, dress up as them, fill our perfectly good lattes with their guts? What is the strange hold they maintain over autumn-crazed white girls that allowed Big Pumpkin to make this kind of madness possible?

Every year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere and allows himself to be transformed into these convenient pocket packs.

Like all white girls in season-starved Southern California, I admit I go a little crazy for the orange chalkboard penned menus in Starbucks around October. Add in the little green vining curlicues and something primal inside me rises up to order a pumpkin latte.  If I can get it in the last week of September I feel smug that I've beaten the system and have stolen a tiny bit of the perfect ambrosial flavor of the autumn they get to have for free in--I don't know. Maine? 

It's all SOOOOO easy when you have deciduous trees and a temperate continental climate, isn't it. Smug.

Pumpkins were one of the first things I tried to grow in my urban farm. I had visions of fields of curling pumpkin vines, the likes of which I had always hoped to see at the so-called pumpkin farms that dot San Diego county but which are typically parking lots covered in straw bales and cardboard crates of the same pumpkins you can now just pick up at Vons. Even the mythical "Big Max" pumpkins, those huge monsters that grow to a whopping 50-100 pounds and you could conceivably sit inside (not that I was entertaining ideas of making myself a fairy tale carriage...really...) now wait patiently in piles right outside the local big box grocery store. The mystery of the growing pumpkin is stolen from us. I want to pick my pumpkin off the vine, not off the shelf. 

The other thing that increasingly troubles me with pumpkins is that even the fresh from the farm pun'kins are bred specifically for carving and not for food anymore. Open up a typical "Jack o'Lantern" pumpkin and you'll find specially selected innards that are stringy, not goopy, and easy to remove; almost no seeds, and nothing inside that you could make into a pie.

Or into Pringles. 

Pumpkins have become kind of like turkeys. Over the last century we decided that we didn't need turkeys to taste good, particularly, we just need them to be big. Selective breeding gave us turkeys that gained weight quickly, even if it does sometimes outpace the ability of the bird to support that weight. Since turkeys don't need to brood their eggs, and a brooding turkey hen actually has a lower laying rate, no one bred for maternal instinct and for the most part it has disappeared from commercial turkeys. The new shape and size of that turkey, with its heavy and muscled frame, make it almost impossible for adult turkeys to complete the mating act, and as a result the fertility of commercial turkeys is so low that most turkey farmers use artificial insemination to fertilize their eggs. What we're left with is a commodity that has been so uniquely bred for its singular purpose that what remains is little more than a cheap corn-to-protein engine.

Pumpkins are no different--a holiday novelty used far more often in decorative piles stacked up by the doorstep in the Barefoot Contessa's flawless Martha's Vineyard colonial, or carved up into dizzying Pinterest-inspired monuments to insanity before ultimately being smashed on the streets of the suburbs, than they are ever as a food source. Pumpkins were crucial for the pilgrims, man! This was the gourd that kept Native Americans fed through the winter and eventually kept the British colonists from starving during their lean times. Given our propensity for pumpki-fying everything in sight (I admit it, I had a pumpkin-spice facial at a spa in Palm Desert), shouldn't we at least know what a pumpkin seedling looks like, and show people who carved pumpkins after 1997 what a goopy pumpkin that you could potentially make a pumpkin latte out of looks like?

Pumpkin latte, step 1. 

Pumpkin seeds are super easy to sprout indoors; a fresh packet of seeds will pop up strong, waxy leaves with satisfying reliability, cracking through the seed shell from the inside and bursting into life. The seedlings, started in February or March, grow slowly at first, but then explode into gargantuan leaves of amazonian proportions and myriad brilliant yellow starburst flowers by May. The vines start creeping over the sides of raised beds, tiny crazy curlicues corkscrewing up retaining walls and rocky slopes and fences. Mine mingle among the sunflowers and climb the sturdy stalks, blossoming under the canopy of the sunflower seed heads.

In my early attempts, like so many things with urban farming, I assumed that because the seeds were so easy to sprout, pumpkin growing would be easy. I mean, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "Farmer Boy" Almanzo is, I don't know. seven? And manages to use some kind of milk-feeding technique to grow a prize-winning monster pumpkin that beats all the adult farmers at the fair. I guess I thought if a little kid could do it, how hard could it be? I conveniently glossed over the fact that at seven Almanzo cut ice, dug potato vines, drove a team of his own oxen, and broke a colt, having come from one of the most prosperous gentleman farming families in the East. This is a kid who comes from a farming community where the teacher literally, LITERALLY used a bullwhip to discipline the hard kids.

"I SAID, 'I' before 'E' except AFTER 'C'!"

Sure. That kid's experience was basically the exact same as mine, since I did drive to the fancy nursery and pick through the prettily illustrated seed packets and buy one.

Pumpkins were one of the first things that I actually researched before planting, although not enough to realize that I didn't need to sprout the entire packet of "Big Max" seeds. I ended up with twenty seedlings that all needed to be set out at crazy distances from each other in full sun and quickly realized I had spent weeks nurturing pumpkin-lets I was now going to have to kill, always a hard pill for me to swallow. But I dutifully selected the toughest seedlings with the strongest true leaves and planted them in holes along the side of a sunny slope like the seed packet suggested, with a scoop of compost in the hole. They grew quickly and expanded into vines of about a foot and then suddenly, sullenly refused to grow any further.

Shoot. Back to the web. Aha--squashes, and pumpkins in particular, are notoriously greedy feeders. I followed a recipe to make compost tea and started feeding my little vines regularly. Soon after they sprouted a handful of flowers, and about three of the ten developed into little yellow pumpkin babies.

The humble start of my pumpkin farming empire. 

The flowers kept coming but the pumpkins didn't, and even though I fed the vines with increasing frenetic regularity, the pumpkins didn't reach anything close to their promised size of 50-100 pounds. The seed packet promised that some record holding pumpkins had reached 300 pounds! Mine were about 5 pounds. Still--they did turn orange and it was fun to watch the vines climb up my rocky hill.

The next year I found a few pumpkin seeds in the bottom of the seed packet and threw them in my sprouting pods with the rest of my spring starts. Only one popped, so I figured I'd still get at least one nice pumpkin. I fed it better this time, planting it in a nice compost/garden soil mixture to begin with and adding vegetable fertilizer on top of the compost tea. I'd also read that when bees are scarce squash and pumpkins can be artificially inseminated (shades of the noble turkey!) so I watched to see when the female flowers appeared so I could pollinate them from the males. 

Alas, my pumpkin vine that year was an all-boys club. Even though I watched it like the hawks that circle my chicken coop, no female flowers ever sprouted. Boy flowers, in abundance. They had a full parade of sassy male flowers, showing off their gaudily dressed pollen sticks. But no girls showed up. I suspect they may have realized what I read, too late, that pumpkins aren't self-fertile, so even if the female flowers HAD sprouted, I wouldn't have been able to use the male flowers from that one lonely unicorn of a vine to make little incestuous pumpkin babies.

A story about a pumpkin vine that didn't know it was related to itself. 

Failure again. I tried for the third time this spring with "Spookie", a food and carving pumpkin that is supposed to have great flavor for pies as well as a strong shell for carving. Though I did discover all new ways to fail (putting seedlings into sunny but newly energy efficient windows that filter out UV light isn't a super successful strategy) I did use my past failures for good instead evil (plant more than one, plant in a good compost/manure/soil mix, fertilize fertilize fertilize through the flowering season) and to my delight, I got the chance to swallow my pride and artificially inseminate some pumpkins this year because the girls came out to play!

All the single ladies, all the single ladies...

Hey gurl, how YOU doin?

Female flowers have a little clearly evident circular ova, as in the top picture, while male flowers have a very prominent stamen they like to show off. The stamens are abundant with huge almost cartoonish pollen grains; it was quick and easy to play bee and use a cotton swab to gather quite a lot from the stamens, and from there do a little match making.

Cue the slow saxophone music. 

The female flowers start with little swollen round bellies under the petals to start with, about the size of a walnut, but once they've been pollinated they immediately start to grow like crazy sci-fi pregnancies. This little alien baby is only a few days old.

My pumpkin patch isn't the typical one, I suppose. Huge volunteer sunflowers came up from the compost I planted my pumpkin seedlings in, and since I like things a little out of control and overgrown, I let the sunflowers grow up above my head and shade the soil in a forest of stems and amazonian leaves; bachelor buttons are coming up at their roots with more bright yellow blossoms to attract the bees. The pumpkin vines twine up the thick sunflower stalks, creep up my fences and anything the iconic curlicues can grab onto, popping out flowers like fireworks at every height, and spill out over the sides of the raised beds; and this year since I fertilized and composted well enough the vines are growing in every direction with enormous spade sized leaves. "Spookie" comes out with a striped green rind a little like a watermelon and quickly grows from walnut to apple to a thick, dense grapefruit size within just a few weeks; and it's small, only about 6 pounds and probably more suited to the nutrition I can reasonably supply using my own homemade compost and chicken manure, without adding a lot of expensive packaged fertilizers.

Depending on your zone, "Spookie" can be planted between April and June and ripens fast, only around three months total, which can seem early; but once the pumpkins are totally orange and resist fingernail pressure (and the vines die back), cutting the pumpkins and letting them cure in the sun for ten days or so will make sure they last for the months we have to wait until reasonably indulging in pumpkin flavored Listerine. I always wondered how the fakey-fake pumpkin farms kept their pumpkins in huge piles sitting in parking lots or in cardboard boxes without them rotting--because one of the reasons they were truly the perfect food for both the Native Americans and the early colonial settlers was their perfect suitability to long-term storage. I can't wait until mine start to orange-up and start on the pie-making and the latte syrup and, obviously, come up with my own artisanal recipe for hand-baked pumpkin Pringles.