Check out this handsome lady I found in the trail cam files this morning!

The critters much prefer the paths humans have cleared, including the trailed packed down by snow mobile-ers! This piebald seems to be the only deer that is visiting us regularly this winter, even though we’ve stopped putting food out this year, to raid our compost pile.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to crack open some of the hulless seed pumpkins. All the pumpkins and squash seem to have handled curing and storage pretty well. All the ones that were green or green striped have turned yellow and orange, with some of the hulless seed pumpkins turning more yellow with green, rather than green with yellow.

One type of hulless pumpkins (Styrian, I think. I’ve lost track!) have turned completely yellow and orange. So I decided to open up the two largest ones, first.

One of them was already being stored in the kitchen. It had a very hard shell and took some doing to break into!

There were fewer seeds than I expected, but that might be just the variety. The seeds looked nice and plump at least. I did try one, and the tasted was… meh. I’m sure they’d be much better, roasted and salted. After taking the seeds out, this was all there was.

So I went and got another one, which was larger.

That one did not have as hard a shell on it and was much easier to cut into. Which I actually took as a bad sign.

It had plenty of seeds in them, but they were all flat. Which suggested the pumpkin was still too immature when it was harvested. Considering the growing conditions of last year, that’s not surprising. I left them out as long as I could. I did go back and check the rest, and some are softer than others, but I’ve left them for now.

I know these pumpkins are supposed to be edible, not just the seeds, but in the end, I cut them into smaller chunks and set them on the compost pile for our visiting deer and the birds.

Later on, I was going through seed sites (because I can’t help myself!) and checked out the descriptions for things I’d already bought from other companies, including the hulless seed pumpkins. A couple of them noted that, while the flesh is edible, it’s not really table worthy. One of them even said that they are good for livestock!

Can we count a deer as livestock? 😄

As of this morning, I could see that the pieces were knocked about in the snow, but were still there. Something at least tried to eat them!

The Re-Farmer