A barefoot, gray-pigtailed woman marks her home with an orange cone on a country road. But that's not all that is orange on her property.
Pamela Faith, 60, an artist and resident of Lake City, has collected rotten pumpkins for her 130-acre property for about a decade.
"I've collected a good 1,000 pumpkins this year," she said. "They cover about an acre of land."
She took three trips on Saturday with a 2-ton dump truck to pick up the last batch.
"It gets pretty orange around here about this time of year," she said. "I hate to admit it's not my most favorite color, but you would never know it."
Faith uses the pumpkins for a few reasons. The chickens that roam her yard like to eat them, as do opossums, raccoons and foxes, and she puts them right inside the chicken coop.
Faith's family even eats them.
"I make bread, soup, cookies, cake and muffins with the pumpkins," she said. "Pretty much anything you can make with apples, you can make with pumpkins, and I certainly do."
Some pumpkins are put underneath plant beds and decorate her yard. She said they are great mulch and compost material.
But Faith said she enjoys decorating with them before they rot away.
"I love to decorate and just play," she said, sitting at her kitchen table, which is covered with pumpkins.
Faith grew up during the hippie era, when she said people cared more about the Earth and the environment. The mentality has stuck with her.
"It's important to me to live my life as close to the Earth as I can," she said.
The pumpkins do omit a putrid odor, but it's worth it.
"I don't mind getting stinky if it lets me reuse something," she said.
Phillip Faith, 53, said while enjoying a dinner of baked pumpkin that he thinks his wife's pumpkin collecting is a bit extreme.
There was a time when he worried about their car's tires because she loaded it with so many pumpkins that it was barely off the ground.
However, he does think it adds a little something extra to their home.
Anne Gay, who works at the First United Methodist Church's pumpkin patch, said that she is grateful that Faith picks up all of the pumpkins.
"I'm a person (who) believes in not wasting anything ," Gay said. "It's just wonderful to me that she can do this."
And Pamela Faith is happy, too.
"The art of my life is decorating, cooking, gardening," she said. "Pumpkins let me do it all."
