Pumpkin Fever

I caught a fever at the end of September and it’s lasted for more than a  month.  It’s called Pumpkin Fever and it’s the kinda fever you get when you just can’t seem to quit buying pumpkins.  It’s an insidious disease that takes hold at the beginning of October, reaches a fever pitch as the 31st approaches, subsides around the first part of November, and then rears its ugly head, yet again, around the 4th Thursday in November.

Interestingly, Pumpkin Fever vanishes by the end of November {poof!} and the infection lays dormant for another 10 months.  And, there’s a downside of Pumpkin Fever:  once infected, victims are carriers for the rest of their lives, infecting generations to come with the fever.  And, throughout the carrier’s lifetime, frequent flare-ups occur almost annually.

Even though I bought a perfectly acceptable Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin at our first foray to Bates Nut Farm at the end of September (plus a white pumpkin and a blue pumpkin and a few {I think 7} miniature pumpkins!), every time I’ve been to a store that sells pumpkins, I buy another one.  Wait.  That’s not quite true.  I did leave a drug store with no pumpkin in hand.  But, I put one in my cart – a perfectly glorious pumpkin – and then as I headed to the check-out counter, I put it back!  Yea, me!  Good job!  I fought the fever valiantly and bought one less pumpkin!

But, even though I resisted the one time, I’ve collected quite a few pumpkins this year:

• Buttercup pumpkins
• Cinderella pumpkins
• Cotton Candy pumpkins
• Fairytale pumpkins
• Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins
• Jarrahdale pumpkins
• Oz pumpkins
• Pie pumpkins
• Pink Porcelain Doll pumpkins
• Pumpkin Tree branches with little, itty, bitty pumpkins
• Valenciano pumpkins

The above is not a complete list of pumpkins.  But, I bet if I searched long and hard enough, there are at least 42 varieties of pumpkins!  These are just the names of the types of pumpkins I collected this year!

Here’s a peek:

For a house with a lot of windows, we don’t have terrific lighting!  Some of these pictures are proof of that.  When we built the house, we purposely faced the front door north and the back of the house south to keep our house cooler in the warm months.  Our old house faced east and west and the sun streamed in, but our house was always hot!  Who knew that 4 years later I would be doing so much photography inside my house!  Natural light is almost always preferable to flash, as evidenced by the photo above.  I still have lots to learn about photography to compensate for the poor lighting issue!

I love my lopsided pumpkin stack!  In this picture, you can see a silver tray peeking out from underneath the bottom pumpkin.  I placed a silver tray under the pumpkins in case they start to decay, so they don’t ruin the throw or the table.  The beautiful throw I bought at Pier One about 5 years ago.  It’s not quite big enough to cover our tables and it’s too fancy to actually use as a throw.  I drag it out every fall and use it in some way on one of our tables.  The bottom pumpkin is a Fairytale Pumpkin, the middle pumpkin is a Jarrahdale (blue) pumpkin and the top pumpkin is a Cotton Candy pumpkin.  You can see another picture of the beautiful blue pumpkin in an earlier post:  Blue Pumpkins.

I took pictures all the way around this pumpkin stack so that readers could see that they are not perfect!  But, it’s kinda fun having a Tim Burton-type Halloween centerpiece without too much work!

Okay, okay – these aren’t pumpkins!  They are some kind of gourd, but I did buy them at the pumpkin patch!  Anyway, I thought they were so pretty, I had to get them!  An offshoot of Pumpkin Fever is Gourd Fever…

This is a very large, extremely large basket of pumpkins by our front door.  Sadly, the light is so poor in this part of our house, there was nothing I could do to take a better picture!  Even photo editing in PicMonkey didn’t help!  Below is my feeble attempt to make this picture better in the editing phase…

All of these pumpkins would have probably fit in this large basket.  But, when I started stacking them in the basket, I didn’t want to cover them up!  I love the stems and wanted each pumpkin to have its own place of honor!  A Pumpkin Fever brain freeze!

See what I mean?  How could I cover-up that Jack-O-Lantern’s noble stem?  Or the pink pumpkin?  Or the top of the large, beautiful white pumpkin with its tinge of blue?  Each pumpkin needed its place to shine!

Here’s a close-up of the pink and blue pumpkin in the basket.  It’s a terrible picture because of the flash and I did my best in photo-editing to make it better {sigh}!  But, I love this pumpkin.  I think it’s my favorite.  When I look at it, I think of my dad, who loved to paint abstract paintings.  This hybrid blue/pink pumpkin has such depth to it – the colors swirl around, blend slightly in places adding a purplish glow and it has specks of creamy yellow that glow a golden hue.

Here’s a better picture in natural light.  I moved it to my office desk next to the window.

Here’s my one-and-only pink pumpkin this year.  It’s not perfect (obviously) and in its misshapen identity, I thought it might not get chosen by a family to take home!  So, I bought it.  It’s really not pink, but a lovely shade of peach with a smattering of lime green splattered across one side.

Here’s a more “traditional” view where it doesn’t appear to be so deformed.  Did you know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and that pink pumpkins are one of the symbols of support for Breast Cancer Awareness?

This is the stack of pumpkins by the basket by the front door.  This, too, was taken with a flash, but in photo-editing, I was able to make it look not so bad by cropping other pumpkins out of the picture.

Here’s a close-up of the mini striped pumpkin on top of the stack.

These are the fruit of the Pumpkin Tree placed in a lidded glass pedestal jar.  I bought branches of the Pumpkin Tree at Trader Joe’s about a month ago and the stems started growing mold, but the fruit looked fine.  So, I snipped them off the branches and placed them in the jar to enjoy for a few more weeks.

Don’t they look like little tiny pumpkins?  So cute!

These are seven mini pumpkins in a gorgeous silver bowl.   I got this bowl several years ago at Z Gallerie.    And, if one picture of these pumpkins isn’t enough, here are six more:

And, if these aren’t enough pictures of pumpkins for you, you can check out my pumpkin post from last year:  Parsimonious Pumpkins.  If nothing else, you will see how much my photography has improved in a year {grin}!

Hope you’ve had a touch of Pumpkin Fever this year, too!

Tootles,

Related Posts:

(other posts about pumpkins)

• 42 Shades of Orange
• Blue Pumpkins
• Call of the Whinny:  Yet Another Story from the Farm
• In Search of The Great Pumpkin
• Parsimonious Pumpkins
• Pony Rides, Playtime and Pumpkins
• Princess P Picks a Pumpkin
• Princess Sweetie P Picks a Pumpkin
• Pumpkin Season
• Roasted Pumpkin Seeds with Sea Salt
• Scarecrows, Sunflowers and Face-painting:  Another Story from the Farm