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The Toadstool Bookshop is located at 12 Depot Sq.

Downtown Peterborough NH.

For more informaition you can call 603-924-3543

Look at the FINAL VOTE! It's a landslide!

Ramses and I are trick-or-treat pros. We get so much candy every Halloween that it lasts us until the next year. Some of you will point out that Halloween shouldn't be all about candy and we shouldn't be eating so much of it. But to you, I say "Trick-or-treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat!"

Ramses' & F.W.'s super tips for getting the biggest

Halloween candy haul you've ever seen.

1) Have a couple of costumes ready. Start early and run to all of houses on your route. Then, run home, drop off your candy, and change costumes. Go to all of them again. Do this as many times a possible. We suggest fake mustaches, vampire teeth, funny wigs and other easy to switch accesories to help you change your appearance quickly!

2) Have an adult drive you to all the big houses in the fancy pants neighborhoods. They usually have the real good candy. You might even get full candy bars!

3) Try to get your parents to take you out later in the night. People are looking to unload their extra candy and you can be a willing recipient. Can you believe that there are people who want to get rid of candy?!

4) Ask around at school beforehand and see which houses have the most generous candy givers. Planning a route that is known to have good candy hordes is smart trick or treating. Rember, quantity of houses does not always beat quality. Sometimes it's best to go to fewer houses where the nice people know how to spoil a trick or treater instead of hitting a bunch of houses where they give out the dreaded pennies.

Oh, and make sure your parents are okay with you getting so much candy, and show it to them before you eat it. They might go on about your teeth and dentists and stuff, but they're parents and that's what they're supposed to do.

Happy Halloween and Happy trick-or-treating!

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

For all recipes, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Separate the pumpkin seeds from the pumpkin gunk, rinse them well, cover with flavoring, and spread them out on a tin foil covered cookie sheet (in a single layer). Cook for about 15 minutes until slightly brown. Enjoy your seedy snack, it will be a good break from the candy!

Mix 2 cups pumpkin seeds with ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, 1 tablespoon oil and 1 teaspoon salt.

Mix 2 cups pumpkin seeds with 2 tablespoons of oil. Mix in one small packet of ranch flavored powdered dressing mix.

In a small bowl, melt a small amount of butter. Add Dijon mustard and a splash of teriyaki sauce. Mix to taste. Then, mix in the seeds, covering evenly.

Whisk 1 tablespoon egg white in a small bowl until soft and foamy. Add ¼ teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon cinnamon and add two cups pumpkin seeds.

Hope you like these recipes. If you come up with your own pumpkin seed flavor concoction, let us know so we can try it too!

Moo-Cow helps with the cooking while trying out his, Count Spatula: The Vampire Chef, costume.

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Hey look what we went to see! Who ever thought that throwing pumpkins with ancient castle siege technology would be so fun!

The Yankee Siege is located at the Yankee Farmer in Greenfield, NH.

Alright, so those other two guys had another debate and were afraid to invite me, again. Who needs to debate though, I'm obviously the people's clear choice in this election, have you seen the poll? I'm cleaning up!

Just to make sure my rise to the White House (I think I'll rename it the Cape Castle when I get there) doesn't hit any snags, I'm going to unveil my newest and greatest campaign poster yet.! It was created by one of my biggest supporters, Gomoo, and she really got this one perfect. Just look at it...

What more could you want. It reminds people about my big promise (capes for all), it has a handsome likeness of me on it. and it has given me a great idea for renaming the states. I think Gomoo is on to something with that. My first one will be Alabama though. I like the sound of Ramabama.

Thanks Gomoo! Maybe you can be my poster advisor when I'm president.

You probably only think of pumpkins at Halloween when you’re carving them into jack-o-lanterns, but they’re actually pretty amazing plants worthy of year-round admiration. Here are some pumpkin facts you might not have known about.

A single vine can grow as long as 30 feet. At its peak, the vine can grow as much as 6 inches a day!

The pumpkin is a member of the Cucurbit family which includes squash and cucumbers, and the fruit is the largest in the vegetable kingdom.

Pumpkin plants usually keep low to the ground, but they do have the ability to climb over shrubs, up fences and even onto roofs! They do this by sprouting little tendrils that are touch sensitive and can curl around any waiting object in the path of the vine.

The flowers of the pumpkin plant are edible. I like them fried in a batter and topped with a little powdered sugar.

If a pumpkins skin is broken while it is young, it will cover the wound with a “scab.” Sometimes people will use a blunt object to draw something on a pumpkin so it will permanently bear the mark. It’s something like a pumpkin tattoo!

Right now is an exciting time for pumpkins because the world record for weight is being broken every year. Currently the record is held by a pumpkin that weighed 1,689 pounds, but it looks like it might be beat this year by “The Beast From the East,” a pumpkin that currently weighs about 1,878 pounds and is still growing! These giant pumpkins can put on 30lbs a day and some people say if you watch them closely you can actually see them grow.

Drag the items over to Moo-Cow and design the costume you think he should wear.

Well, you might have noticed that we've been taking a bit of a break from the website after we finished the camping trip. We're sorry about that but it's for a very good reason. We're finally getting to work on the art for what will be the first MCFC book release, and the first in a series called "Oraculous Tales." Each book in the series will find the gang being transported to a different time and place in history to have an adventure and meet Rhetorical at the age he was then. Here is a sneak peek at the very first illustration that kicks off the first Oraculous Tale called, "Sword of the Ramurai!"

So, please bear with us for a few more weeks of scant updates while we continue to work on the book. We'll keep you informed about our progress on the book as we work on it, and of course we'll let you know when it is finally done.

Our last night of camping was perfect. We had a beautiful sunset, a good fire, a perfectly clear night, and we even convinced Rhetorical to finally tell a scary campfire story (a little too scary for me).

We packed up early the next morning and all piled back into the car to head home. Not far from our campsite we saw this little turtle trying to make his way across the road.

 

Moo-Cow had us stop so he could provide the turtle with ferry service to the other side.

Thanks for coming camping with us, we hope you enjoyed it! Why don't you leave us some comments telling us about some of your past camping adventures, we'd love to hear about them!  

I brought some empty notebooks, pens, pencils, crayons, and tape on our camping trip so everybody could make their own nature journal. I think it's the best way to remember and store all of the cool stuff you see when out in nature. Here, I'll show you how you can make one too!

Get a notebook that is a style and size that you are comfortable with. It can either be blank or lined, but spiral bound notebooks are the best type for this kind of journal.

Also make sure it is roomy enough for you to draw in it or to glue in samples (like flowers or leaves). Your nature journal is basically just a record that you keep of things that catch your eye when you are outside.

Here are some ideas of the kinds of things that you can put in your nature journal.

If you're stuck on how to get started try getting out your drawing supplies and drawing your favorite tree in your backyard. Along with the drawing write down any observations you make about the tree and maybe take a sample of its leaves to tape into your book.

After you add drawings or samples to your journal, find out what they are and write them down. Your parents or a friend might know, or else you can always look it up. But if you don't know what something is while looking at it don't worry about it. Just write and draw what you see with the best description you can give and you can always figure out what it is later.

Try filling a whole page with just stuff you see from one spot, and see how it all adds up to really give you an good idea about a place!

If you are lucky enough to come across something like baby birds in a nest, you can do an ongoing entry in your journal where you check on them every couple of days and record their changes. Just make sure not to get too close to wild animals, and of course never touch them.

Uh oh, I better go explain it a little better to Kiweenie. I see him over by a bush squishing bugs in his book and then licking the pages! Oh yeah, that's another rule—don’t ever kill anything to put it in your journal. If it is alive, then draw a picture to remember it by. Have fun nature journaling!