Working with Pumpkins

By Lottie Holbrook

It’s pumpkin season. Well, it’s really autumn which means crispy leaves, colder temperatures, and Halloween. I love Halloween. The dressing up. The candy. The pumpkin carving. All of it! So, at my first ever Owl Post meeting, I was given the task to write about how to decorate with pumpkins and how to pick a good pumpkin. 

Pumpkin picking. [editor’s note: aka how to starve a pumpkin]

When picking a good pumpkin you need to make sure it is a deep orange colour. Kinda like the colour of a pretty sunset. Give it two or three good raps and if it’s hollow sounding, it’s ripe. Then check the bottom. If it’s soft and squishy, it’s no good to work with. Avoid! Next, check and make sure that the stem is firm and secure to the pumpkin, this is important cause it’ll be the handle for any carving or painting that you will be doing. Finally stay far away from those pumpkins that are bruised because they won’t be really good to be used for anything but pies. Size doesn’t really matter because it boils down to what you want to do with it.

Pumpkin carving [editor’s note: aka how to murder a pumpkin]

Pumpkins can be carved into all sorts of things. Different shapes, characters, faces. You can even use multiple pumpkins to create stuff. What you do is you cut the stem off and set that aside. Then, you scrap, scrap, and scrap a little bit more the gunk out from the inside and set it aside. (Pumpkin guts and seeds are really good treats after you’ve cooked them up.) Once it is cleaned out, you can carve the design onto the pumpkin. Some people use patterns to follow while others do it free hand. Once the design is done, you put the pumpkin on a flat surface, put a candle inside, and tadaa! The pumpkin is done!

Pumpkin painting [editor’s note: aka how to suffocate a pumpkin]

You can also paint the pumpkins. With this process you don’t cut open the pumpkin or clean it out. You pick your colours, your patterns, and go to town on the pumpkins. The sky’s the limit as to how the pumpkin is decorated. This is a bit safer for people who don’t like cutting things.

Magic and Pumpkins

Apparently there are spells in transfigurations that affect plants. This was crazy. And imagine what the possibilities are with this. Herba verto will take a plant and turn it into something similar to it’s size. That really has a lot of amazing possibilities. There are probably limitations to it, but I’m not really sure what they are. But, hey, you can use magic on pumpkins too.