photos by Happy Mundane (from left: play it cool with blues or warm it up with oranges and yellows)

What would the month of October be without the beautiful and iconic pumpkin? Whether you plan to harvest your own home-grown pumpkins, or visit your local patch, here are some tips to insure successful pumpkin plucking.

When to Pick

Pumpkins need to be picked before the first hard frost of the year. Depending on the growing conditions, baby pumpkins can vary in size. Baby gray and white pumpkins are ready to pick when there has been no change in size for about a week. When ripe, the fruit stem will start to turn brown. Baby orange pumpkins are ready to pick when the skin gets a slight yellowish sheen.

Full-sized orange pumpkins will turn deep in color when they are ready to be picked. Their skin should be hard enough that it does not crack when you poke it with your fingernail. Don’t pick a pumpkin too early, because it will stop turning orange once it has been cut from the vine.

How to Pick

Pumpkin vines are quite prickly, so make sure to protect your hands with gardening gloves. We recommend the West County Work Gloves (below), which are lightly padded in order to completely shield your palms from prickers. Look, they have adjustable wrist straps, too, so you’re sure to get a good fit.

Pumpkins also have quite a thick stem, so you will need a sharp tool that can easily remove the fruit from the vine. The Hori-Hori Garden Knife (below) is perfect for this task. The blade, which has been forged from high carbon steel, can easily slice through the vine. Make sure to leave a portion of several inches of stem, however, otherwise your pumpkin will quickly rot.

Now, how to extract all that gooey goodness from the inside, so that you can make your own pumpkin desserts, or a jack-o-lantern? Try the super versatile Soil Scoop (below.) The serrated edge and pointed tip are designed for a wide variety of garden tasks, from weeding to chopping to planting. But check it out; this tool will also be totally perfect for scooping out pumpkin guts, and even scraping all the stringy pieces off of the inside. The Soil Scoop even comes in both green and purple, so they’re not just cute, but easy to spot in your yard or tool chest.

What to Do with Your Perfect Pumpkin

Try this cool idea that was recently featured on homemadesimple.com. These gorgeous black and white pumpkins were created using stencils. Make sure to wash and dry the surface of your pumpkin before painting it, and also tape the stencil securely to the surface before painting. A nice bonus is that when pumpkins are painted rather than carved or cut into, they can last for several weeks.