Pumpkin Smash and Leaf Collection Saturday

The Prospect Heights Community Farm -- community garden on St. Marks between Underhill and Vanderbilt -- will have our annual Pumpkin Smash and Baked Potato Bash this Saturday afternoon.

What is a pumpkin smash? It's heaps of fun -- you bring your sagging jack o'lanterns and ritually sacrifice them in a manner befitting their pagan-ish nature -- that is, by slamming them into the ground until they burst apart in all their gooey glory. Fun for the whole family.

The pumpkins then enter the Circle of Life via the garden's compost system, providing nutrients for next year's plants. Certainly you agree that your jack o'lantern would prefer being consumed by worms in a garden to being sealed for eternity in a landfill in -- horrors -- suburban Philadelphia?

Refreshments are served -- hence "baked potato bash". Sit & Wonder is donating coffee, and we'll have cider, potatoes, and whatever else folks bring along -- feel free to bring something to share, too, though you don't have to.

This year, we're also collecting your raked-up leaves at the Smash/Bash, as a part of the effort Arches described to keep compostable yard parts out of the waste stream, since the city isn't composting them this year. You can think of this as helping out the garden if you like -- certainly we're happy to have them as "browns" to offset the "greens" we compost for the PH CSA, the FG Greenmarket, and various local businesses (say Hi to your old Sit & Wonder coffee grounds sometime). But since Arches and the rest of the Compost Brigade are far too nice to say so themselves, I'll point out that they're actually doing a fair amount of work to help us all by lowering the amount of waste we landfill and therefore the cost to taxpayers. Plus, not wasting waste is just the right thing to do.

SO for all your Pumpkin, Potato, Leaf, and Think-Global-Act-Local needs:

PH Community Farm Pumpkin Smash, Baked Potato Bash, and Leaf Collection
Saturday, 11/7
1-4pm
St Marks, btwn Underhill & Vandy