Happy Halloween!!

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(Actually, these are Chinese lanterns at a lovely old Craftsman home that has been turned into a tea house. But I thought they looked nice and spooky!)

Pumpkins, Paintings and Paintings of Pumpkins

As heady as the apple farm was on Saturday (see previous post), the pumpkin farm we visited immediately after was equally a sensory overload.

Gordon Skagit Farms is a third generation farm specializing in harvest fare that evokes the classic autumn experience – pumpkins, squashes and Jonagold apples.

But mainly pumpkins – heirloom, orange, red, yellow, white, gray, blue, round, flat, oval, tiny, big and even some called Cinderella. Including one or two that actually…just might..be big enough…to be turned into a carriage…

Owner Eddie Gordon is, not only a passionate farmer, proud of his beautiful crops, but also an accomplished painter and brilliant display artist. He transforms his farm into an outdoor gallery for his dramatic, large-scale pumpkin-themed paintings and his barnyard into a visual feast of outrageously creative pumpkin and gourd displays.

Add in laughing parents wheelbarrowing eager kiddies out to the fields to painstakingly choose their pumpkins for a truly memorable autumn day.

Apple Harvest Heaven

The rain that neglected us throughout our beautiful summer has arrived to claim its rightful autumn place. Thus, with yesterday being the only clear day in nearly ten, and the only one forecast for another ten, we gathered boots and sandwiches and camera gear and headed north to the fertile Skagit Valley, a picturesque and bucolic land of red barns, organic farms and in spring, acres and acres of tulips.

Our first destination – Jones Creek Farm, to pick (but mostly photograph) their fields of over one hundred varieties of heirloom apples. Met by frisky dogs and smiling owners bearing hot apple cider, we found the farm was a portal to a time machine, whisking us back to childhood romps through abundant orchards filled with caramel colored light and the scent of windfall apples enveloping the air.