A giant pumpkin welcomes visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC last year. Photo by Neil Rosenau, via Flickr.
This year is proving to be a bonanza one for pumpkins. Newspapers and TV stations all over New York are reporting that the dry summer we just had made all the pumpkins ripen especially early this year.
The Glens Falls Post-Star ran a story on Saturday that attempted to reassure the Capital Region populace that the early ripening won't translate into early rotting:
The warm spring and very hot summer accelerated pumpkin growth this year, said Lisa McDermott, the Capital Region vegetable specialist for Cornell Cooperative Extension.
"Usually guys are trying to color their pumpkins in early September to move them out to markets where people might want them. Pretty much everything was ripe in September, but some were ripening in August this year," she said.
Although it was a little unnerving to see pumpkins coloring in August, McDermott said the quality is just as good.
Your News Now had a similar story on Sunday:
Tim Stanton owns and operates Stanton Farm in Feura Bush. He says thanks to a warm and dry summer with a good amount of rain toward the end of the growing season, this year's pumpkin yield is healthy, abundant and ready two weeks ahead of schedule. "We had to irrigate them in order for them to grow because there wasn't that much water," Stanton said.
Locally, there really are a lot of pumpkins. The Pure Catskills blog reported in late September that Schoharie County's Cold Spring Farm already had a "bumper crop" of pumpkins, and provided the photos to prove it. Last week, the Mountain Eagle interviewed a Stamford lab tech who moonlights as a grower of 700-pound pumpkins. (He seems to be doing well this year, too.)
Apparently, pumpkins did well all over the country this summer, which, according to the Christian Science Monitor, means that a year-long shortage on canned pumpkin caused by too much rain at Nestle's Illinois farm last year is over:
Normally Nestle's fall harvest yields enough pumpkin to last until the next year. But its farm in Morton, Ill. — the source of nearly all its pumpkins — received about double the typical rainfall last year. Tractors sat mired in muck and much of the crop rotted in the fields. Canned pumpkin was gone from the shelves as early as Thanksgiving in some places.
(Did you miss the fact that there was a nationwide canned pumpkin shortage last year? So did we. Guess that's the risk of having all your canned pumpkins come from one farm.)
