pumpkin week - pumpkin seeds - Greening Sam and Avery

When you have two families over to carve pumpkins, plus your own giant pumpkin, you end up with LOTS of pumpkin seeds. What do you do with them?

Well, we will be digging holes in our backyard (the VERY back of our backyard) and burying most of them to try and grow another pumpkin patch next year. We did this last year too and we did actually get a vine but it ended up not being in a great spot and was trying to climb all over our air conditioner (not cool!) so we had to pull it out. Luckily our compost pile produced a massive pumpkin patch for us anyway. We are hoping to grow pumpkins again next year and it would be great if they would grow from the seeds from this year. It is a great life-cycle kind of lesson for the girls to see.

But before we do that I thought it would be fun to try out a crafting project with them. My inspiration came from a picture that I saw on Pinterest but the link would not work so I had no idea how they accomplished it.

We started out by drying out the seeds in the oven just a bit (low temp and only a few minutes). Then I mixed some food coloring with vinegar, just like dyeing eggs, and dropped some seeds into each color.

You can see that some seeds are much brighter in color than others. The mixture of vinegar and color was not working out so great so for some of them I did just food coloring and mixed the seeds straight in the food coloring. Those turned out much brighter.

Then we grabbed some cardstock type paper (old cracker boxes) that would be stiff enough to old a seed mosaic.

We used regular white glue and started creating.

Our final products.

Sam's

And mine

Sam had a really fun time with this craft project! And I think the final product turned out super cute!

What do you do with your pumpkin seeds?

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The Nitty Gritty!

Of course I would suggest cooking some of your seeds too but I have yet to find a recipe/way to cook them that I really like. I did buy some roasted ones for the kids at the carving party to try. My girls seem to like them okay, so if you have a recipe that you use and enjoy I would love hearing it.

I found out later that the craft I saw on Pinterest was also listed on Hands On: as we Grow's Pumpkin Activities post. You can see the Autumn tree pumpkin seed craft here. On the hands on:as we grow post you can also see other pumpkin seed crafts, ways to explore the pumpkin guts and even pumpkin seed math! Love these ideas.

Lots more pumpkin fun coming!