Your Pumpkins Want to Die

We picked up some pumpkins for autumnal vibes in October, and as is tradition I moved them to the backyard in early December once they started to look decrepit, as I wasn’t interested in cleaning pumpkin goo off the front steps (again). This crop surprised me by not changing much over several weeks even after the move, until right at the new year when the largest rapidly deflated.

My practice is to let the pumpkins get pretty gross before transferring their remains into the compost bin, simply because there’s not enough space when they’re all rotund and vibrant. Squirrels and deer will munch on them too. Plus I like to watch them rot, creepo that I am.

Pumpkins are really squash, and lots of things can make squash rot slower or faster. Common culprits are water (especially when it pools at the top in the indentation around the stem), bacteria, or extreme cold (if frozen, the rind will rot quicker once the temperature climbs).

Like many fruits, squash naturally produce ethylene gas. Ethylene itself is a ripening hormone, also called a “death hormone” if you’re feeling metal. In squash, ethylene makes the fruit mature and its vine dry up and drop off. Squash are considered moderate producers of ethylene but are also sensitive to it, meaning that if you pile up lots of pumpkins in a confined space or store them with other ethylene-producing produce, they’ll rot faster, as will many kinds of fruit. Composting of course produces a lot of ethylene, which is generally considered a good thing since it hastens decomposition.

But absent jack o’ lanterns and pies and spice lattes, rotting to death is what the pumpkins desire. The pumpkin wants water to get in there and soften the rind. It wants to be munched by squirrels and deers and bacteria. It wants to suck up all that delicious ethylene and collapse into a smear of smelly nutrient-rich goop, full of seeds to sprout the next generation. About half the time I let the pumpkins rot in the yard, new pumpkin vines pop up in the same spot in spring. Not exactly managed cultivation, but the squash wants what it wants.

Hooray Today in Tabs is back! Tabs is easily my consistent favorite elder statesperson newsletter, along with a lot of other grizzled fools. Plus it was creator Rusty Foster who cinched my decision to move … whatever this is I’m doing, over to beehiiv, which I’m overall quite pleased with. As per usual, the pleasures of Tabs are Rusty’s commentary but also his ever so tasteful curation of pointless absurdities that seem like I should have heard of them long ago, such as this random death generator powered by London death notices from 1665. I know the wormes that killed me aren’t the worms discussed previously, but let’s not vermiscriminate.