Waiting for Pie

Way back in May I transplanted my pumpkin seedlings. In the intervening weeks, those tiny seedlings have been growing. 

I keep looking for pumpkins, but it takes an entire summer to grow a pie! Here’s where they are right now. Most of the yellow flowers are male flowers – they are the ones that produce pollen. But there are a few female flowers here and there. 

As the pumpkins grow, so do the leaves – shading them from the sun. New England Pie pumpkins take about 100 days to grow from a seed. That’s more than three months, so with luck I might see ripe pumpkins about the time The Pie that Molly Grew hits bookstore shelves. 

Here's the cool thing about pumpkins: you can eat the entire plant. Yep, those  shoots, tendrils, leaves, flowers – even immature fruits – are edible. And tasty, too. Last summer I learned that young leaves and shoots can be stir-fried. Just remember to peel the outer prickly skin off first. And some folks use leaves to make soup. I’ve had squash-blossom fritters before, but you can also toss the flowers into salads or quesadillas (remove the stamen and any sepals or stem).

The Pie that Molly Grew releases August 15th with a blog tour! So you may find me chatting with other bloggers about pumpkins, gardening, pollinators … and pie. You can pre-order autographed copies from Riverow Bookstore, located in historic downtown Owego, NY.

See you next month with some funny stories from the pumpkin patch.

Celebrate Pollinator Week with Pie!

This week is Pollinator Week! If you like food - especially pie - you've got pollinators to thank for making them possible. Same for watermelon, pickles, and chocolate.  The birds, bats, and bugs that pollinate plants are responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food.

So, Three Cheers for Pollinators! And let's celebrate by making pie! It doesn’t matter what sort of pie you want – strawberry-rhubarb, peach, apple, blueberry, pumpkin – if you want pie, you need bees. So when I was writing The Pie that Molly Grew, I knew I wanted to include the important work of bees in the book.

Apples,  peaches, strawberries, blueberries – they all depend on bees to pollinate the blossoms which then ripen into yummy fruits. Pumpkins too. And yes, pumpkin is a fruit even though it when it’s baked and smooshed and slathered with butter it looks like a sweet potato. And while peach and apple and strawberry flowers have everything they need in one blossom to produce a fruit, pumpkins don’t.

When pumpkin plants flower, they produce male flowers and female flowers. The male flowers make the pollen and the female flowers, once pollinated, make the fruit. There’s a problem, though: pumpkin pollen is too heavy to be carried by the wind. So pumpkins depend on bees to move the pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers.

Fortunately there are plenty of native bees that will do that job: bumble bees, carpenter bees, squash bees, cuckoo bees, longhorned bees, and sweat bees. And you’ll even find honey bees hanging around pumpkin flowers, too!  

I'm celebrating pollinators all week, so drop by and check out pollinator patches, bee guides, and more!

The Pie That Molly Grew should hit bookstores around August 15, but you can pre-order a copy at Riverow Bookshop in historic downtown Owego, NY.

Recycle Your Pumpkin into a Bird Feeder

photo by Amy; used with permission ( Home Happy Home)

You know those pumpkins that have been sitting on the porch for the past week? Now that the trickers are gone and the treat basket's empty, it's time to recycle the jack-o-lantern. Here's one idea: make a Bird Feeder. All you need are:

• a hollowed out pumpkin cut in half (or the bottom part of a jack-o-lantern)
• some twine
• tacks or staples
• birdseed

Here's what you do:

• Cut your jack-o-lantern in half (or cut and clean an uncarved pumpkin). Clean out soot and wax with a damp cloth and let dry.
• Use your knife to thin the edge of the shell so birds can get a good grip.
• Take two long pieces of twine or fat ribbons or rope or strips of recycled blue jeans and tack them to the bottom of the shell. Then bring them up four sides and tie at the top so the shell sits in the strings like a hanging planter. 
• Hang the pumpkin feeder and fill it up with bird seeds, peanuts, those pumpkin seeds you saved and never roasted...

... and don't be surprised if your birds - or maybe the neighborhood squirrels - take a nibble or two out of the pumpkin.

Check out more resources, book reviews and sciency things-to-do at STEM Friday.