Well, this year our garden pumpkins were dinky (again), and I was going to say I didn’t know why– but I think it do. They need feedin’, and we didn’t feed them. All the manure went to the other plants and flowers, and our pumpkins struggled along as best they could.

Enter Jean, an older lady friend of Jessica’s in town, and her spacious garden with its dumptruck load of manure every spring. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another garden as productive as Jean’s, and her friendship with Jessica has certainly borne fruit. As here: This behemoth is the biggest I’ve ever seen outside a county fair. We’ll be putting manure on our pumpkins next year.

As for Halloween this year, we’re far enough out in the sticks that we don’t take the kids trick or treating. (And anyway, anybody lurking in the woods at nighttime around here is liable to get shot.) We’ll be taking them to a Trunk-or-Treat in town. But the kids have all drawn and painted our cantaloupe-sized pumpkins from the garden, and left this guy for Dad. When I get a chance I’ll draw on it, and then after the tooth-rottin’ festivities Jess will wash them all off and can them. That’s a lot of pumpkin for pies and cookies. No sense wasting it for a lopsided Jack-o-lantern.