5 Easy Ways to Repurpose a Whole Fresh Pumpkin

Repurpose a whole fresh pumpkin with these five easy ideas. You’ll practice the art of sustenance, self-sufficiency and frugality all with one pumpkin. Now that’s old-fashioned skills at their finest!

Every year I have a few plants I love to grow in my garden. Pumpkins are one of them! I encourage others to grow them as well. I’m super passionate about all the ways pumpkin can be used and I hope you can take my ideas and utilize them to your benefit.

Pumpkins offer a lot of nutrition and lend themselves to creativity in the kitchen. From the flesh to the seeds and even the rinds, I’ve learned how to use every part of the pumpkin so nothing goes to waste. Frugality at it’s finest!

Like other produce, pumpkins aren’t something that you have to grow in order to have a bulk amount. Especially here in the Midwest, pumpkin patches pop up everywhere in the fall. Many backyard gardeners also share their bounty in a roadside stand.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of them to fill your freezer for the year and the effort is definitely worth it. A can of pumpkin definitely doesn’t compare to fresh pumpkin in your freezer. The taste difference is indescribable!

If I’ve peaked your interest enough, let’s briefly talk about growing your own pumpkins.

The Case for Growing Your Own Pumpkins

As an experienced gardener, there’s nothing I love more than when I look out and see my crops growing with little effort. For me, pumpkins are one of those crops.

But the varieties are endless so where should a beginner start?

Choosing the Right Pumpkin Variety

What do you want to use your pumpkins for? That’s the first question to ask yourself.

I’ll argue that some varieties are better for cooking than others, but any pumpkin is good for the freezer. Pie pumpkins and the grayish-blue Cinderella varieties offer a sweeter, richer flavor than a Jack-o-Lantern.

But if you want to grow your own pumpkins for carving, I’d go ahead and grow the Jack-o-Lantern variety. The seeds and flesh are still good to use for cooking and baking.

Jack-be-Littles are fun too! They’re great for decorating and as you read on, they’re good in the kitchen too.

You can purchase your initial pack of seeds just about anywhere that seeds are sold. I currently buy the majority of my seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds or MI Gardener. Both are reasonably priced.

How to Grow Your Own Pumpkins

Put your pumpkin seed in the dirt as deep as the seed is tall and cover it up. Water it in and keep the soil moist until the seed germinates. Water consistently until the pumpkins are ripe for picking. No need to worry about weeding.

That’s essentially it. Honestly, it really is as simple as that!

Here on my blog, I aim to encourage readers based on my experience and not complicated information. I want everyday people to know a healthy body is possible by God’s way, not man’s prescribed way. And growing your own food doesn’t have to be complicated.

Now, that doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges. For example, this year I didn’t even have one pumpkin grow in my own garden. I didn’t panic though because I bought some at the local produce market in our town.

I think the issue was lack of pollination. While you can hand pollinate, I chose to not worry about it and focus my efforts on other crops.

Another possible challenge you might face is powdery mildew or fungal blights. Pests like aphids or squash bugs are another possibility.

You can stress about these issues, or just let nature be. Guess what?! I’ve faced all these issues, not taken any action and I’ve harvested many pumpkins for my freezer.

Soil Health for Pumpkins

Healthy soil is important for all crops including pumpkins. It boosts the nutrition content in your food and wards off pests and other diseases.

A good layer of compost and manure tilled in during the fall helps pumpkins a lot. But the real truth?

I’ve seen pumpkins grow everywhere from a tiny little hole in someone’s grass to rich compost piles. I’d say that means someone living in a big city high rise can grow pumpkins in a pot on their balcony. The vines might need a little more pruning than a country garden, but it’s totally possible to do!

Growing food though is very regional and I encourage you to follow local gardeners in your area or online influencers from a similar growing region. Growing pumpkins in Wisconsin is quite different than growing pumpkins in California.

How to Repurpose a Whole Fresh Pumpkin

You’ve gone to the local pumpkin patch or harvested from your garden and have a whole bunch of pumpkins on hand. Now what?

I have five easy ideas for you to repurpose a whole fresh pumpkin.

Use Pumpkins for Fall Decor

Before cutting them up for the freezer, use your pumpkins for decoration. This is one of my favorite tips because it serves two purposes.

First, it’s free fall decor, especially if you’ve grown them yourself. Second, it prolongs the amount of preserving you need to do in the fall.

When tomatoes, apples, pears, and all of the other fall crops come due at the same time, preserving gets to be a little hectic, and well, stressful to be honest. They’re all spoiling at the same time!

With a hard rind and the right storage climate, pumpkins last into the winter in their whole form. I even incorporate some of the Jack-be-Littles into Christmas and winter decor.

Leave them as is for the fall and paint them up for Christmas time. Stacking them for “snowmen” are my favorite way to decorate with the little ones. It can even be done with the bigger pumpkins as well.

I used DIY Paint by Debi’s Design Diary for these pumpkins, but any paint brand works. Be creative!

Use the Pumpkin Flesh for Cooking and Baking

This is the most obvious way to repurpose a whole fresh pumpkin. It’s generally why most people grow them in the first place.

Pumpkin is used for both savory and sweet recipes. Pumpkin sausage soup is my favorite way to use our pumpkin in the freezer. Pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving with homegrown pumpkin puree is second to none.

For a pumpkin pie in your hand try my Pumpkin Hand Pies with Honey Icing. They’re a great fall treat!

The culinary possibilities are endless. And delicious too.

How to Cut a Whole Pumpkin

Before cooking or baking with a pumpkin, you’ve got to cut it into pieces. If you’re new to from-scratch cooking with fresh ingredients, let’s go through a quick step-by-step.

How to Preserve Pumpkin

With your pumpkin cut up into cubes, it’s time to get it preserved for future use. You can either pressure can it or freeze it.

• Canning Pumpkin – Safety is the number one priority when it comes to canning pumpkin. One-inch cubed pumpkin pieces may be pressured canned according to safe canning practices. **PUMPKIN AND SQUASH PUREES CANNOT BE CANNED AT ALL.** Yes, it’s that important. The puree is too thick for a home pressure canner to kill botulism spores all the way through the jar. It’s not worth the risk.

• Freezing Pumpkin – Instead, freeze your pumpkin cubed or pureed. Of course I encourage everyone to use glass jars when possible, but to be honest, the majority of my freezer items are in Ziplock bags. Freezing pumpkin better preserves its nutrition. Always something to think about when preserving food.

Use the Pumpkin Seeds

Culinary Uses for Pumpkin Seeds

One by-product of cutting a pumpkin up are the seeds. They’re great for a couple reasons.

Unless you have digestive issues with seeds, they’re healthy for eating. Roast them in the oven with salt for approximately 25 minutes at 350 degrees, stirring halfway through baking. This tends to satisfy my crunchy and salty cravings instead of potato chips.

When they are done, eat them as is or use in homemade granola or other baking recipes. Instead of salt, experiment roasting with different ingredients such as powdered ranch mix or cinnamon sugar.

I even use them as treats for Sadie and she thinks they’re pretty great! She’s forty pounds though, so I don’t recommend using them for smaller dogs.

How to Save Pumpkin Seeds for Next Year’s Harvest

Saving pumpkin seeds is super easy. It can be done one of three ways.

• First, soak the seeds in water to ferment them and help remove the gelatinous nature of the pulp off of them. After three-five days, remove the seeds and rinse with fresh water. Dry completely on a towel and store them in a jar, a Ziplock bag or an envelope in a cool, dark area.

• Second, an easier option is to simply separate them from the pulp as much as possible and let them dry on a towel. Store according to my directions above. This is for us who are okay with a little less precision and don’t mind a mess 🙂

• Third and easiest option, simply go out to your compost pile or garden area and toss them to the wind. They’ll voluntarily come up in the spring and you won’t have to worry about planting them. This is really great for those of us who grow a large garden with lots of crops. One less thing to worry about!

How to Use Pumpkin Rind

One easy way to repurpose a whole fresh pumpkin is to utilize the rind. My favorite way to use it is to make homemade broth.

Learn how to make your own homemade broth with my tutorial.

When we first moved to our home, I wanted to learn how I could use all the dandelions in our yard in the spring. That online search led me down a rabbit hole of old-fashioned skills.

Homemade broth making was one of them. That’s when I learned to save veggie scraps for homemade broth. When my first harvest of pumpkins went into the freezer, the rinds went to the veggie scrap bag.

I included the pumpkin rinds and found out they make a delicious broth.

Another way I use the rinds is simply to leave them on the flesh when cutting up the whole pumpkin. I learned this in the last year from watching Jamie Oliver. He’s great for cooking inspiration! It saves time when cutting them for the freezer.

The rinds soften while cooking and provide extra fiber for a nutritional boost. Sounds good to me.

Compost the Pumpkin

The final way to repurpose a whole fresh pumpkin is to simply toss it to your compost pile or feed for the chickens if you have them.

If you have too many and can’t give them away, throw the whole pumpkin on your pile. After a frost or two, they’ll soften and start to decompose quickly.

If you don’t have time to deal with the seeds, pulp and rinds separately, toss them into the compost pile right away.

Otherwise, my favorite and most frugal hack is to use the rinds for broth making and then throw that waste onto the compost pile. Talk about the most bang for your buck!

And again, if you throw seeds onto the compost pile, it’s anyone’s guess as to how many volunteer plants you’ll get next year. Try it and see what happens!

If you have anymore ideas to share with everyone, let us know in the comments below! Be sure to tag me in your photos on Instagram @beckybuttlesamericana.

Happy Fall Y’all and Thanks for stopping by my blog – Becky