Big pumpkins - Big business

By Michael Carter

clydenews@bizwoh.rr.com

Pump­kins play an impor­tant role in Hal­loween tra­di­tions. Jack-o-lanterns are seen across Amer­ica as a sym­bol of the Octo­ber holiday.

What peo­ple might not real­ize is that pump­kins, at least in Ohio, are also big business.

Accord­ing to the United States Depart­ment of Com­merce, Bureau of the Cen­sus, there are more than 4,000 acres of pump­kins planted in the Buck­eye state each year.

There are also around 750 pump­kin farms in the state which gen­er­ate between $900 and $2,160 per acre. That means pump­kins in Ohio are a $3,000,000 to $7,225,000 busi­ness depend­ing on har­vest and demand.

“This year’s har­vest looks to be aver­age,” said Dan Polter of Polter­berry Farms in Fre­mont located in San­dusky County. “We are just get­ting into our fields, but things look to be OK.

“Num­bers are aver­age, but size seems to be good.”

Polter farms 180 acres in San­dusky County, which is the top pumpkin–producing county in the state. San­dusky County farm­ers plant more than 500 acres of pump­kins each year.

“We will be able to serve all our deal­ers again this year,” stated Polter.

“We ship most of our pump­kins to New York, West Vir­ginia and Penn­syl­va­nia. We ship between 125 and 140 semi truck loads a year. Each semi holds about 52 bins of pump­kins with around 40 pump­kins per bin.”

The word “pump­kin” orig­i­nated from the Greek word Pepon, which means large melon. Pump­kins and squash are believed to have orig­i­nated in the ancient Americas.

There are sev­eral types of pump­kins and even more vari­eties, but the most com­mon is the Jack-o-lantern.

In Amer­ica, a tra­di­tional Jack-o-lantern refers to a vari­ety of pump­kin grown for its suit­abil­ity for carv­ing. They are fairly large in size, have upright strong walls, and most impor­tantly, a large hol­low cavity.

Pump­kins are planted in the spring once ground tem­per­a­tures reach about 60 degrees. They are planted in rows about 6–8 feet apart and about 2–3 feet between plants.

This past grow­ing sea­son was almost pic­ture per­fect for pump­kins. Pump­kins like a long, warm grow­ing sea­son and are usu­ally picked in late Sep­tem­ber or early Octo­ber. How­ever, the extreme heat this sum­mer also had a neg­a­tive impact on this year’s harvest.

“The heat did affect our crop,” said Polter. “When it was time for the bees to be out pol­li­nat­ing our crops, they were not able too. Things were way too hot, and the bees had to stay at the hive to keep them cool.”

Pump­kins are used for dec­o­rat­ing to eat­ing with sev­eral uses in between. With 1.5 bil­lion pounds of pump­kins pro­duced in the United States each year, it is one of the most com­mon but unknown fruits.

Peo­ple use them for cook­ing pies and also dry out the seeds and eat them. Indi­ans intro­duced pump­kins to the Pil­grims for this rea­son. They also stored well mak­ing them a valu­able food source in the win­ter. Accord­ing to the web­site www.allaboutpumpkinscom, Pil­grims also were known to make pump­kin beer as well.

Pump­kins are even said to be a use­ful body care prod­uct. Woman have been using it as part of exfo­li­a­tion masks for years.

There are many ideas as to just where the tra­di­tion of Jack-o-lanterns at Hal­loween came from. Early Jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips and car­ried in Celtic celebrations.

The Eng­lish used beets and lumps of lit coal and placed that inside hol­low roots of vegetables.

When Euro­pean set­tlers arrived in Amer­ica they found that our Amer­i­can pump­kins were well suited to being carved as a “Jack’s” Lanterns.

In the late 1800s, there was a move­ment to turn Hal­loween into a cel­e­bra­tion empha­siz­ing com­mu­nity and neigh­bor­hood activities.

Michael Carter is the edi­tor of the Clyde Enterprise.

Posted by Rob Treynor on Oct 4 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.