Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1875 — The Pumpkin. [ARTICLE]

The Pumpkin.

The pumpkin is a large, yellow fruit, about one foot in diameter, and not far from being round. The seed ot it is shaped like the head of an Indian arrow and is about the size of your middle finger-nail. The seed is inserted into the ground about the 15th of May and comes to light in about six days. The pumpkin keepsi on busy growing until the first day of October and then gives up the contest. Pumpkins grow on a vine, and there is but few if any smarter weeds than a pumpkin vine. On rich ground they will grow four inches a day, besides growing about two inches each night, and they have large, yellow flowers on them about the size of the other end of a key bugle or French horn. Each one of these flowers means a pumpkin, and I have seen sixteen ableoodied pumpkins on one vine. Pumpkins are planted among corn, and after the corn has been got off I have seen the pumpkins so much on the ground that you couldn’t count them. The most remarkable thing about the pumpkin is the pie that is in them. Each able-bodied pumpkin has from six to eight pies in them, and there ain’t no food, ancient or modern, can outstyle them. Pumpkin pie is as hard to beat as the simple truth is. Pumpkins are cut up into strips and hung up in the kitchen for winter pie. It is a noble sight to go home to the old kitchen in the dead of winter and see the ceiling of the dear old room all frescoed with long strings of red peppers, bunches of sage, knots of pennyroyal, links of sausage, blown-up bladders, dried sunflowers, dried apples by the yard, catnip blossoms, a mink skin or two, and a ten-foot pole stretched clean across the room hung full of blessed pumpkin cut an inch and a quarter wide into strips ready for pie. * If a man has never seen this sight he has lived a good deal in vain. I was born in a back room right alongside of one of these old kitchens, and iiave laid on nay back with my heels up in the air, when I w r as a baby, by the hour, on the kitchen floor, and looked up with delight and veneration at the dried pumpkin overhead. There is not, on the face of the whole earth, a more joyful place for memory to go back to than a kind mother’s kitchen, hung around with dried pumpkin, and to see again the dear, good woman, with a check apron on, and sleeves rolled up, and arms dipped into a huge mass of steaming pumpkin, clear up to the elbows, and watch the nutmeg, and butter and cream as it goes into the great tin pail, and have your mouth grow liquid as you think of the pumpkin pie that to-morrow will come out of the big bake-oven, done just to a nicety, as yellow as gold, gently browned on the top, and good enough for George Washington to eat, the father of his country. Many a man has been born in a palace, or some elegant mansion, and lolled on ottomans and trod on costly carpets all his life, and felt grand, and no doubt thought he was happy, but he has missed a rare pleasure; he cannot look back to the clean, white floor of the old kitchen, and remember how he hung around the great tin pail of pumpkin-pie batter, and got a taste once in a while of the lovely mixture before it went into the oven. These are the things that a man never forgets; the elegant things of wealth leave no such impressions. I don’t know where or when the pumpkin was first discovered, or who it was who first worked it up into pie. Christopher Columbus found America; Newton was the father of gravitation, and many a man has spent his whole life and talents on perpetual motion ahd never caught up with it, but who first found a pumpkin or invented it is a mystery up to this hour. Pumpkins grow the most cheerfully in New England, because folks are most kind to ihem there, but the pumpkin is a good-natured plant, and will grow any'wherf if people ain’t sassy to it. It has about 350 seeds in the inside of it, and each seed is a receipt in full for sixteenryoung pumpkins if the seed is hid in good ground.— Josh Billings,'in N. Y. Weekly.