Cattle Gathering Beef Program
The Texas AgriLife Extension Office in Erath and Comanche County will be hosting a Beef Cattle Gathering Program, October 30th, 2025, at The Station FNB, 815 North Patrick in Dublin. The program will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with lunch provided by Red Chain Feeds.
Program topics will include New World Screwworm with Dr. Sonja Swiger, Professor/ Entomology Extension Specialist; Beef Cattle Nutrition and Hay Quality with Dr. Jason Cleere, Professor / Extension Beef Cattle Specialist, Beef Cattle Market: Where Do We Go from Here, with Dr. Jason Johnson, Associate Professor / Extension Economist for Management.
1 IPM CEU will be offered to producers with a private applicator license.
Please RSVP by October 24, 2025, at the Erath County Texas AgriLife at 254-9651460 It’s science: Why is pumpkin actually a fruit Joe Masabni, Ph.D., Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service vegetable specialist, said pumpkins are scientifically classified as fruits because of how they grow. Anything that starts from a flower is classified botanically as a fruit.
People typically consider something as either a fruit or a vegetable based on how they eat it rather than how it grows.
“We see them as to whether we eat them as a dessert, salad or as part of a meal,” Masabni said.
For example, consider cucumbers or tomatoes. People typically don’t eat them as desserts, he said. They often eat cucumbers and tomatoes in salads or cooked meals, so they may think of them as vegetables, even though they’re fruits.
“The pumpkin is a tricky one, though,” he said, “because some people make soups or stews from pumpkins, which is a meal, while others make pies, which is a dessert. So that can lead to confusion.”
The difference between a fruit and a vegetable lies in whether the produce starts as a flower.
“All plants start from a seed,” Masabni said. “Let’s take the example of lettuce as a vegetable. It makes more and more leaves, and then you harvest them and eat those leaves. If you let it go even longer, it will eventually make a flower stalk and make seeds that we harvest and store for next year’s crop.”
A pumpkin plant starts the same. However, its flowers eventually turn into the fruit we eat – in this case, the pumpkin itself.
“A pumpkin starts as a small plant with a few leaves, and as the leaves grow and more branches develop, flowers will start to bloom on the plant,” he said. “Those flowers then need to be pollinated by bees or other pollinators. Once a flower is pollinated, it develops into a fruit that we consume. So ultimately, fruit relies on pollination of the flower to become the thing we eat.”
Besides pumpkins, some other fruits that are typically confused with vegetables are: Cucumbers, Tomatoes, Eggplants, Corn, Zucchini, Okra, String beans, Squash, Peppers “The fruit and vegetable debate is a fun one that hangs on the technical, scientific view of these plants that we consume,” Masabni said. “At the end of the day, we want to inform people, but we also want them to enjoy these plants as gardeners and at the dinner table.”