20 Things to Do With Pumpkin Seeds After You Carve

That bowl of slimy seeds you’re about to scrape into the trash is the best thing your jack-o’-lantern will ever give you.

The US grew 1.47 billion pounds of pumpkins in 2025, according to the USDA, and about 85 percent of pumpkin acreage goes to the fresh and ornamental market instead of processing.

A lot of those get carved, parked on a porch and thrown out, seeds and all.

Yours is holding a few hundred of them.

Here are 20 things to do with pumpkin seeds instead.

1. Roast Them, Shell and All

You don’t have to peel anything. That tough white hull is edible, so you can eat the whole thing, shell included.

One ounce of whole roasted seeds has about 130 calories, 5.3 grams of protein and 5.2 grams of fiber. That’s roughly a fifth of your daily fiber, plus about 18 percent of your magnesium and about a quarter of your zinc.

Low oven, stir often. That’s the whole secret.

2. Boil Them in Salt Water First

Salt on the outside of a hull stays on the outside of a hull. A lot of people swear by a quick simmer in salted water before roasting, so the salt gets inside the shell where you can actually taste it.

3. Crack Them Like Sunflower Seeds

Those green pepitas at the store can come from hull-less pumpkin varieties or from seeds with their shells removed.

A mutation that produced seeds with no hull seems to have shown up in Styria, Austria, around 1880. Growing them took off after World War I because the oil could be made with less work and less expense.

You can still buy hull-less varieties, and the names are great: Lady Godiva, Kakai, Streaker. Somebody had fun naming the naked ones.

Your carving pumpkin missed that mutation. So roast the seeds, crack them with your teeth and spit the hulls, ballpark style.

4. Throw Them on Soup and Salad

Croutons have had it too easy. Whole seeds bring the crunch plus about 5 grams of fiber per ounce, versus about 2 for the shelled kind.

5. Bulk Out Trail Mix or Granola

Trail mix is mostly an excuse to eat chocolate. Roasted seeds add 5.3 grams of protein per ounce and cost you nothing.

6. Freeze a Stash

The fat that makes pumpkin seeds taste good is the same thing that makes them go bad. Leave them at room temperature for a long time and they turn rancid, so anything you’re keeping for a while goes in the fridge or freezer.

7. Dry Them Instead of Roasting

Not everything needs to be blasted with heat. A dehydrator will take them to crisp at barely warm temperatures, and a very low oven does it in an hour or two with some stirring.

8. Blend Them Into Sikil Pak

Pumpkin seeds were the main source of fat and protein in Mesoamerica for a very long time, and “sikil” is the Mayan word for them. Sikil pak is a Maya dip from the Yucatán built on toasted pumpkin seeds, tomato and habanero.

Squash has been grown on that peninsula for at least 4,000 years. Ranch can’t say that.

9. Save Them to Plant Next Spring

Free pumpkins next year, with one honest catch.

Wash the seeds and dry them until they’re brittle enough to snap cleanly in half. Keep them somewhere cool and dry (the fridge is ideal) and most seed stays good for at least 3 to 4 years.

Now the catch. Pumpkins can cross with zucchini, acorn squash, spaghetti squash and gourds, so the seed you saved might not grow into the pumpkin you carved. You could get a jack-o’-lantern. You could get a zucchini-pumpkin mutant that’s very different and may not even be edible.

Think of it as a surprise decoration, not dinner.

10. Grow Them for the Bees

Squash flowers are a nectar and pollen buffet. Planting pumpkins gives pollinators something to work on through spring and summer, even if you never get a single pumpkin out of it.

11. Compost Them (and Expect Surprises)

The official advice is to pull the seeds out before you compost a pumpkin, so you don’t get unwanted plants sprouting. Ignore that on purpose and those seeds can sprout into volunteer pumpkins right out of the pile.

“Unwanted” is a matter of opinion.

12. Mix Them Into the Bird Feeder

Backyard birds will eat pumpkin seeds if you put them out, and so will plenty of small mammals. Dry the seeds in the oven first so they don’t mold, and skip the salt and seasoning completely.

A platform or hopper feeder works best. With a tube feeder, check that the seeds actually fit through the ports. Where bears are active, skip both bird feeders and pumpkin feeders.

13. Build a Snack-o-Lantern

Half a pumpkin makes a perfectly good bird feeder. Hollow it out, push two sticks across for perches, hang it with rope and fill it with birdseed and your dried seeds.

Only use a firm, fresh pumpkin, and only put out what’ll get eaten in a few days. Soft or moldy ones go to the compost.

14. Give Them to Chickens (but Skip the Dewormer Hype)

Chickens go nuts for them, and they can eat them safely.

What you’ll also hear, pretty much everywhere, is that pumpkin seeds are a “natural dewormer.” That’s mostly coop folklore with one small study behind it.

That trial used 90 Philippine native chickens in three groups of 30. Ground pumpkin seed was “moderately effective” at reducing counts of two kinds of worms and only marginally active against a third, and the researchers said it had potential as an alternative.

Potential isn’t proof. Feed them as a treat, not a treatment.

15. Sprinkle Them on the Dog’s Dinner

Dogs can eat pumpkin seeds, with or without the shells. Keep them plain and unsalted, and the safest way to serve them is roasted and ground up over their food.

Serving them whole? Watch your dog while it eats, especially a small one, because whole seeds can be a choking hazard.

16. Hand Them to a Farmer, Not the Forest

Dumping pumpkin guts in the woods feels generous. In some states it’s actually illegal.

Colorado law bans intentionally feeding certain wildlife, including deer, elk and bears, because it risks the animals’ health and safety. Birds at a feeder are one thing, but putting food out for mammals is generally discouraged, especially anywhere bears or rats are an issue.

Better options: a drop-off site, community composting, or a farmer or rancher who collects pumpkins for livestock feed.

17. Dye Them

Pumpkin seeds take color. Food coloring and a splash of vinegar in a bag, let them dry, and you’ve got free craft supplies in every shade you want.

18. Make Seed Mosaics

Draw a pattern in glue and lay the dyed seeds on top. For kids who no longer put small objects in their mouths, try supervised sorting, counting or pressing seeds into playdough. Keep loose seeds away from babies and toddlers because they’re a choking hazard.

19. String a Necklace

A pumpkin seed necklace takes 125 to 130 seeds, so one pumpkin covers it with seeds to spare.

Poke a hole near the center of each seed with a big needle, color them with felt-tip markers and string them on fine elastic. A matching bracelet takes far fewer.

20. Run a Guess-the-Count Contest

Do this one before anybody picks up a spoon. Everyone guesses how many seeds are inside, then you scoop and count.

Schools run it as an estimation lesson. The answer is usually a few hundred, and nobody ever guesses close.

The Pumpkin Was the Packaging

You bought a pumpkin, carved a face into it and almost threw away the part with 5.3 grams of protein in every ounce.

The face rots. The seeds were the point.