Garlic Goes In And Pumpkin Pies ...A Bust?

The garlic went in on Friday night. I read myself blind on whether to plant them with the 'paper' wrapper on or off, if I should soak them or not and some, like Daphne, whose blog I follow, even recommends soaking them in vodka. Because it's my first year growing garlic, I decided to plant the individual bulbs in their papers. This way, if they fail, I'll try a different technique each time until I get it right.

I'm thinking of putting the screening over the beds since something uprooted my lettuce late Friday night and dug out an empty bed, but I'm not sure how important sun is to the growing root system....there's nothing that's going to stick out from the ground until spring, so would it be so bad if the soil didn't get sunlight until then?

Any thoughts would be really helpful.

We had a neighborhood picnic last night and bought three lovely little pie pumpkins for decorations. Today, I took some time and baked Granny's pumpkin pies. The first two got pulled out before the end of the cooking time because I hazarded a peek and sure enough...I burned the crust. I had enough left for one more pie, the one on the left. It also came out way before the time Granny said to cook it because it was getting burned as well. I should have kept eyes on them and covered them when they got too toasty. All in all, they taste wonderful, so I'm not complaining. I put the dark ones in the freezer for later and we tore into the lighter one tonight. I don't have a food processor, so it was still a bit fibrous, but I liked the texture.
We also had some split pea soup going in the crock pot and added cornbread with that for dinner.....it's our first real chilly night.

Not to let the pumpkin seeds go to waste, I roasted two batches. The one on the left is cinnamon and sugar and the right has garlic salt.

They turned out yummy as well, but those seeds from the pie pumpkins are really, really tiny and almost not worth the effort to eat. I'll try it again with the pumpkin we're carving for Halloween.

The morning comes early...and it's going to be a chilly one.

Sweet gardening dreams.