For those with a thrifty attitude a good chance to have something for a little work is coming. During halloween lots of people buy a pumpkin to decorate. A lot of these people don’t see a pumpkin as a source of food, and when halloween is over they discard that pumpkin.

I have started asking friends that paint pumpkins for halloween to let me have their pumpkins after they are done with them. I clean the paint and can these pumpkins. I even pick some pumpkins off the corner that were destined for the landfill. The process of canning pumpkins is easy, and the results are much better than the commercial canned pumpkin. We did a side by side taste test comparing several pies that were the same except the filling and everyone picked the home canned pumpking vs the commercial product.

Almost any pumpkin can be used to provide pie filling or to flavor items like pumpkin bread and muffins. We have not noticed much of a difference between the taste of pie pumpkins and giant pumpkins used as decoration. The only ones we avoid are the warty pumpkins, which are very hard to cut and process.

Even the cut jack-o’lantern pumpkins can have a use. I feed them to my chickens, who eat them to the rind. The remains can be composted. Chickens are happy to make use of an otherwise wasted resource.

Don’t forget about the seeds either, they are my favorite part of the pumpkin. My family will devour a large amount of pumpkin seads before they even cool down after coming out of the oven.

While I like growing pumpkins I don’t bother planting many as I can have all I want after halloween. I bet anyone out there could also have as many as they wanted with just a couple requests or even an ad on a local craigslist or your local stores ad post area.