Pumped Up Pumpkins: How Big Could Your Pumpkin Grow? by Wendell Minor

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH AN ENORMOUS PUMPKIN?

Well, if you can get your heavyweight pumpkin from farm to fair site, there are some grand pumpkin festivals afoot in the fall.  With some of these ginormous gourds weighing in at over 2000 pounds, that's a lot of pumpkin pies and pumpkin lattes in the raw, so to speak.

One big festival even features a regatta of kids paddling boats carved from ginormous pumpkins, across a lake.

But this is a big country, with some BIG famous places. Could a giant pumpkin add something special to those sites?

In author Wendell Minor's imaginative geographical fantasy, How Big Could Your Pumpkin Grow? (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2013), there are many famous landmarks that might profit from a really big pumpkin to add to the attraction.

And at this point Minor dons his artist's beret and lets his imagination loose.  How about a huge, brightly-lighted pumpkin head helping the famous North Carolina lighthouse light the night? Maybe a gigantic pumpkin would feel right at home next to the Capitol dome? Or consider a humongous pumpkin smiling at at a rocket on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral, or perhaps one resting solidly on the Brooklyn Bridge.  A very, very large pumpkin could even cut the world's tallest roller coaster, Kingda Ka in New Jersey, right down to size.

From filling up the Grand Canyon to filling in for a president at Mt. Rushmore, there is a giant pumpkin for  every landmark, or at least fourteen of them, all of which have thumbnail photos and information entries in the appendix in Minor's see-the-USA tour. Vivid full-bleed illustrations combine our most popular seasonal vegetable with a tour of America's scenic places, making How Big Could Your Pumpkin Grow? a triple-threat book which combines two civil holidays and fourteen public places in one handy picture book. Booklist's reviewer says, "Minor’s watercolor-and-gouache paintings are well composed, richly colored, and (best of all) just plain fun. With a text that asks leading questions, this picture book makes a fine, imaginative read-aloud choice.”

Did Someone Say Pie? Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin Pie by Jill Esbaum

HAVE YOU PICKED YOUR PUMPKIN?

Whether you "pick" your pumpkin from your own backyard, the local pumpkin patch, or from the display at your favorite grocery store, that jolly orange orb is THE symbol of fall, a fine fruit which nurtured the founding fathers' families, which as our beloved Jack-o'-lantern inherited the English tradition of scary, carved vegetable lanterns, and a versatile vegetable that appears as a staple of our Thanksgiving table.

Jill Esbaum's Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin, Pie (Picture the Seasons) (National Geographic Kids) takes the young reader from the spring day when those rounded pumpkin seeds go into the ground through the first sprouting, the vines which leaf out in their characteristic curlicues, the gorgeous pumpkin flowers that bloom in summer, and the tiny green balls that increase rapidly into the giant globes we know and love.

THE PUMPKIN IS A KIND OF SQUASH.

THEY CAN BE GREEN, RED, TAN, YELLOW, WHITE, OR EVEN BLUE.

THERE ARE TALL PUMPKINS, SHORT PUMPKINS, SMOOTH OR BUMPY PUMPKINS.

WEE ONES ONLY INCHES WIDE, OR GIANTS YOU CAN SIT INSIDE.

Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin, Pie (Picture the Seasons) is filled with National Geographic's trademark full-color photographs of pumpkins--pumpkins growing, pumpkins harvested, pumpkins carved in many ways, and the delicious foods prepared from the pumpkin's flesh and its delectable seeds, even pumpkins carved into actual boats!

In easy-to-read minimal text, the author even shows the annual Jack-o'-lantern makers how to prepare the seeds as a snack or dry them for planting themselves for a showy landscaping plant with a golden bonus, not to mention fodder for animals or the useful composting material that Jacks past their prime provide for gardens. The book ends with a poignant photo of a pumpkin patch receiving its blanket of winter snow, showing that the traditional pumpkin is indeed a plant for all seasons.