31 October, 2012 4:27PM AEST

Queensland zombie pumpkin vs Halloween

Why import Halloween when we can celebrate our own home grown pumpkins?

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It's been hard to ignore the amount of Halloween paraphernalia on sale in our shops and supermarkets this year.

The last day of October is the time, usually in America, where kids dress up and door knock the neighbourhood 'trick or treating', while parents carve pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns.

It's easy to whinge about importing another festival from abroad, one that seems more about selling chocolates and tacky costumes than anything else. But could we embrace it, or at least use it as inspiration for something a bit more locally flavoured?

What better way to cash in than with our own home grown pumpkins.

Lockyer Valley farmer Kerry Hauser says the timing of Halloween is unfortunate, as locally grown pumpkins aren't quite ready, "it's the wrong time of year for the pumpkins here...because of the frosts...we can probably do a Halloween pumpkin, but we'll need to change the date to sometime in December or maybe January", he laughs.

As the conversation continues, talk turns to the look of one of our own pumpkins, the Queensland Blue. Looking as if the colour has been drained out of it, the Queensland Blue could cash in on another popular cultural icon, the zombie.

Halloween. Zombies. Pumpkins. It all works.

Kerry laughs, "yes, we can do it with a Queensland Blue. We'll call it a Queensland Zombie Pumpkin!"

While the bright orange Halloween pumpkins might be easier to carve they're certainly let down in the eating stakes, "I think they used to grow them years ago and stored to feed the cattle through the winter", Kerry says, "now they're just for ornamental value."

The Queensland Blue, not only a tastier pumpkin, could also save people time. Sure, it might be harder to carve, but let's be realistic, there's no need to carve a face in one to make it look the goods. It does that all by itself.

So if you're looking for a reason to celebrate with pumpkins, why not try a tastier, and arguably trendier, celebration using our own pumpkin, the Queensland Blue. But if you do, be like Kerry, call it the "Queensland Zombie Pumpkin"!