Pumpkins and spicy hot sauce at the Potter School Craft Fair

The Potter Elementary School Craft Fair featured a fall staple grown by the school’s own fifth grade class: Fresh pumpkins.

Students from Anne Goodman’s class were one of dozens of crafters and vendors at the school’s annual fair, held to benefit the school. Sienna Parsons and Alyviah Reed, along with Alyviah’s cousin Paityn Dion, who is in the first grade, were selling the pumpkins for 50 cents a pound.

Each year, the current fifth grade class plants pumpkin seeds for the next class to harvest. Both girls loved growing the pumpkins in the garden their class keeps near the playground.

“It’s really fun to go in the pumpkin patch and look because we don’t spray them with anything, so there are praying mantises and crickets,” Parsons said.

Their class does a lot of exploring outside, Parsons and Reed said. The class is encouraged to examine plants and creatures closely, and keeps a terrarium in the classroom. The class “pets” are two spiders named Hayden Jr. and Tickers, two worms named Stella and Moona, and a cricket named Clickers.

They have also found toads, slugs, snails, and praying mantises in the garden. Classmates will take things they found outside and look at them under a special microscope that projects onto the classroom’s electronic smart board.

“We learn about habitats,” Reed said.

Inside the school, more than 30 crafters and vendors sold various goods.

Kristin Cadieux was selling homemade fairies with her daughter, Autumn, who is a kindergartner at Potter.

The fairies are made from silk flowers, floral wire, embroidery floss, and other materials.

“We just did it as a craft at home for something fun to to,” Cadieux said. This was their first craft fair, and they had just made their first sale: a Christmas themed fairy holding a tiny Christmas ornament.

“It was pretty,” Autumn said. “It was very pretty.”

Dave Werner sold his staple condiment: Big D’s Hot Sauce. Werner makes a variety of hot sauces, jams, marinades, and pickled peppers from the peppers he grows in his garden.

Some of his products are especially creative, like his “Bam-Bam Jam,” a spread that features bacon, coffee, apple, maple, garlic, and, of course, habanero peppers. Werner said that spread is especially good as a marinade for steak, in meatloaf, or on grilled cheese sandwiches.

“My favorite part is coming up with all the stupid names for them,” Werner said. Some of his best names include the “It Will Hurt Worse Tomorrow” and “Blue Lightnin’” hot sauces and the “I’m Not Into Yoga” Pina Colada flavored jam.

For a complete list of his pepper creations, go to his Facebook page, www.facebook.com/BigDsHotSauce.