Wild Heritage Horizons

Halloween has come and gone, hopefully your holiday had more treats than tricks this year. With the passing time, your Jack O’Laterns and pumpkins may be starting to look a bit worse for wear. Perhaps in the past you’ve let your pumpkin sit around a little too long instead of letting it retire gracefully and end up scraping it off your porch to clean up later. Instead of loading your trash cans with the heavy pumpkins, here’s a few alternatives.

If you have a piece of private land you use for hiking, hunting or anything else you can smash the pumpkins open and leave them for various woodland inhabitants to feast on. However, since Pumpkin funeral season overlaps with hunting season be sure to leave the pumpkins away from hunting areas to avoid any baiting incidents. Porcupines, Raccoons, Opossums and Deer are known to eat pumpkins.

You can also compost your pumpkins. If you have a compost pile at home, you can have a little fun smashing your pumpkins and putting them into your compost pile. You may want to remove any seeds before composting to avoid accidentally growing a pumpkin patch in your compost pile.

If you don’t have an area at home to dispose of your pumpkins, check with your town, county or even state environmental offices as they may have a pumpkin smashing event! These are a great public activity where you bring and smash your pumpkins that are then used for compost. Even some farms and zoos will accept your left-over pumpkins to be used as a nice fall treat for some of their animals.

Hopefully you can find another use for your pumpkins, instead of just throwing them away once it becomes unseemly. Try to make disposing of the pumpkins as fun a family event as picking and carving the pumpkins!