Health & Fitness
Local Voices: Frost on the Pumpkin
Read my post for fun activities that connect families and nature, and join Green Spiral Tours for field trips to great family nature places around the Saint Louis area.
First frost dates are falling later and later in the calendar each year. Here in Saint Louis, we used to put our gardens to bed by October 15th in anticipation of the first killing frost; now it’s not unusual to see geraniums mixed with jack-o-lanterns on Halloween.
Kids love pumpkins, and the pumpkin family is worth celebrating as an important food source indigenous to the Americas.
If you still have pumpkins left over from Halloween, put them in the backyard and watch what happens for a full year. Fat bushy squirrels will amuse you as they gorge themselves, and Jack-o-Lanterns will collapse into funny faces at the first killing frost.If you have a whole pumpkin, and the squirrels don’t get all of it, it will melt into a squishy, disgusting mess that is fun to poke with a stick. Come springtime, long after you have forgotten about it, it will surprise you by sprouting a miraculous pumpkin bush.
Pumpkins are easy to grow in Saint Louis, so if you placed your pumpkin in a sunny spot, you are very likely to be rewarded by a volunteer Jack-o-Lantern at this time next year, thus completing another spin around the calendar on the cycle of the first fall frost.
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