Wild Hope Homestead

First I was bitten by the pumpkin competition bug, now I am smitten with a pumpkin. The mini pumpkin Wee Be Little not only provided me with an award-winning pumpkin, it tastes AWESOME! I just want to keep eating it…

Before this, I’d only really had the blue-skinned Crown pumpkins or the pale, insipid, butternut-type pumpkins (or squash, everyone has a different name for them). The former were my pumpkin staple, the latter I loathe. Roast pumpkin is how I roll. Naturally, my first taste of a Wee Be Little pumpkin was a roasted one. It is hard to describe the flavour. The description called it sweet and nutty. I agree with that. It is mellow and soft-fleshed, without the strong ‘pumpkin’ flavour of the Crown pumpkin, but not at all insipid. It’s just so tasty! Even The Husband likes them, and he’s not a pumpkin fan. You just can’t get pumpkins like this from the supermarket.

Another thing I like is that the pumpkins are such a handy, small size. They are less than 500g. You can do one or two at a time, without having a great hulk of pumpkin left in your fridge, which you have to use frantically during the next week to avoid mould and wastefulness. Further, the plants take up way less space in the garden than a rambling Crown pumpkin. My two main Crown pumpkin plants this past season gave me one pumpkin each, for taking up the majority of one vege bed. Yes, it was a poor season, but I got nine pumpkins from my Wee Be Little plant, which took up a space less than 70cm x 70cm. Fortunately, I left a self-seeded Crown pumpkin plant to grow by the carport, which has yielded three smaller pumpkins later in the season, or I wouldn’t have many pumpkins for eating. Next season, I may only bother planting one Crown pumpkin, somewhere out of the way, and more Wee Be Littles. But then there are the other two pumpkin cultivars that I bought seeds of: Small Sugar and Winter Luxury Pie. Yes, I am still working on my orange-tinted Vege Plan…