Pumpkin Abundance

ok, I am getting better and better at this stuff. Despite being VERY pregnant for the entire planting and  weeding seasons, somehow I managed the garden this year, with a very serious help from friends (thank you all so much!) - so as the frost is here, I am trying to find time away from my 4-months old Blessing-of-a-new-baby to can, freeze, bake.

I love being able to make entire meals that are home-grown; not a few per season anymore, but a good number, perhaps even every day! This year the pumpkin patch actually formed a patch... there were many fabulous pumpkins - a vegetable (fruit?) that I despise under normal conditions, but in the presense of overabundance I learned to like it. Turns out there are different tasting pumpkins. I grew some sweet and some savory varieties. The results: the savory kind (American Dill) is baked and frozen with homegrown sauteed onions and spinach. With a splash of goat milk this combo becomes a very good and nutritios soup. The sweet kind (Sweet Harvest) I made (with serious reservations - I hate sweet orange foods!) into pumpkin bread. Honey from our hive for sweetener, eggs from the hens, milk from the goats, only store bought flour and salt - a good pumpkin bread, and it is good with a glass of cold goat milk.
We planted pumpkins under our new raspberry plants: 1) because they are said to deter bindweed (a Southwestern version of kudzu); 2) because raspberries were small and needed more mulch & had irrigation lines in place already but not much plant mass yet; and 3) because I had pregnancy brain and calculated that my (at the time) unborn baby will be eating solid foods sometimes in the dead of winter, and I want him/her to have best organically grown nutrient-rich food ever... so the result is: over 200lbs of pumpkins! A slight overkill. But I hate waste, we will enjoy them as will our friends and their friends.