Clip of the Week: Painting Pumpkins

Happy Friday, everyone!  Are you as excited about Halloween as I am?  This week’s clip is just in time for the weekend, as it offers some ideas for excellent Halloween pumpkin activities.  It features my grandson and the webmaster of this blog, Holland Hume.  Also, a special thanks to Oregon-based artist Tianna Vernon for designing and creating the pumpkins featured in the clip!

As always, our videos can be viewed on our blip.tv channel (link to the right) or downloaded for free from the iTunes Store (search for “ed hume”).

Have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll be back on Monday with a Halloween-themed article!

Sincerely,

Ed

Clip of the Week: Painting Pumpkins

Happy Friday, folks!  Here we are, the last blog before Halloween!  And to celebrate, we wanted to bring back our pumpkin painting segment starring my grandson and the webmaster of this site, Holland Hume.  Holland is a freelance graphic designer and videographer and runs his own site as well, which can be seen here.

I also want to thank my niece Tianna Vernon, who designed and created most of the pumpkins you see in the segment.  She is an amazing artist who creates everything from paintings to fashion accessories to videos!  What a creative family!

Have a fun, safe Halloween and we’ll see you here in November.

Spookily yours,

Ed

Ed’s Podcasts: Painting Pumpkins

Halloween is almost upon us!  Looking for a last minute decoration idea that’s not so messy?  How about painting your pumpkins rather than carving them?  This week’s podcast offers some tips on this alternative to the usual chop-and-scoop activity associated with this autumn holiday.

Ed’s Podcasts: Painting Pumpkins

As always, if you’d like to save the podcast for later playback on your iTunes or iPod, right-click the link above and select “save target as” (Mac users select “save link as”).

Only a few more days to Halloween!  I hope you have your costumes finalized!  What are you going as this year?

Sincerely,

Ed

From the Desk of Ed Hume: Pumpkin Painting

Happy Halloween week, everyone!  Our special holiday coverage concludes with a few tips from Ed Hume about painting pumpkins:

It’s pumpkin time!  Time to go pumpkin shopping, or pick your’s out in your own vegetable garden.  Then get out the carving knife and begin using your creative skills!

Oops!  Wait a minute!  Wouldn’t your pumpkin last a lot longer if you painted it instead of carving it?  And just think: if you paint it, you can be a lot more creative and of course use a whole bunch of different colors too!  For several years, my wife Myrna has painted ours so the pumpkins last a lot longer.  In fact, if you want to make pumpkin pies or pumpkin bread there’s no need to cut open the pumpkin until you’re ready to actually begin fixing and baking!  That way, you can enjoy that Halloween pumpkin probably up to Thanksgiving, maybe even Christmas or New Years if you keep it from freezing.  Myrna uses poster paint for painting her pumpkins.  She designs funny or scary faces, football emblems, fancy designs, and even a few naughty things.  By painting them, she feels she can be a bit more clever and much more creative.  That’s not to say one cannot be both if they carve their pumpkin, but you need to be both creative and quite agile with a knife.  When painting, you can wipe any mistakes away and try again, but with carving you’re stuck with every cut, intentional and accidental.

Painted pumpkins can be used both indoors and outside, but if you use them outdoors protect them from possible frost, freezing, or snow so they’ll last longer.

Maybe next year you’ll want to grow your own.  You might want to look around at some of the new types of pumpkins.  Some are white, others are squatty, some are tiny, while others are huge.  They’re really quite easy to grow if you have a little space in the garden.  One of my friends grows his down the rows between his corn.  He not only claims that it works great space-wise, but he’s found an additional benefit: the raccoons leave his corn alone because of the pumpkin vines.  It seems raccoons won’t go after corn if their ‘point raccoon’ cannot stand on his/her back feet and see what’s going on around them…and the vines are too tall for them to see over!  Hence, the raccoons leave the corn alone.  Try it!  See if it works for you, too!

By all means be certain to take some pictures of your painted or carved pumpkins so you can share your creative abilities with friends now and in the future.  And if you have a chance, send us some shots of your painted pumpkins!  We’d love to see how they turn out, and would even be willing to showcase our most creative pumpkins on our blog!

That’s all for this week.  Happy Halloween to all of our viewers!  Have a safe holiday weekend, and remember: Our relationship with the planet today is tomorrow’s future.
Sincerely,

Ed Hume

Myrna’s Arts & Crafts Corner: Painting Pumpkins

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

For our clip of the week this week, we have two special surprises.  First, this week marks the start of our alternate video series, Myrna’s Arts & Crafts Corner!  Our new series will offer a small detour from all of our garden information, instead focusing on arts and crafts that can be done with common household objects and a little bit of creativity.  These episodes will generally appear around major holidays, but you never know when an additional clip might pop up.

Our second surprise is that this episode is hosted by our webmaster and blog site designer, Holland Hume!  We always try to include members of our team into our projects as much as possible, so when the opportunity came for someone to guest host one of our clips, we knew exactly who to ask.

Below is our clip of the week.  Following our Halloween theme, it offers a little more detail on different ways to paint or decorate your pumpkins this holiday season.

We would also like to take this moment to thank our assistant and resident artist, Tianna Vernon.  Without all of her hard work and her beautiful pumpkins, none of this would have been possible.  Thanks, Tianna!

Stay tuned Friday for our final Halloween update.  Have a great rest of the week, and we hope everyone is getting excited for Halloween!