Where Are The Pumpkins?

If you took a boat onto the Long Island Sound some weeks back you might have seen strange orange things floating in the ocean: pumpkins. Pumpkin patches in our state have been ravaged by record rain and flooding this summer.

But ask a few farmers and workers at the  and no one seems particularly worried, though there's no trace of the full-size gourds.

Brian Gajeski of Gajeski Produce in Riverhead, Long Island says he doesn’t bothering growing them anyway. “If they [customers at his store at the farm] want ‘em, my mother picks them up from our neighbor.” And does his neighbor have pumpkins? “There’s a shortage, but they get them from somewhere. They come from Ohio. Some guys got them, some guys don’t.”

At the other end of the market, Jeff Schulze of Mead Orchards in Tivoli, NY, who lives next door to the farm, thought farms further upstate in central NY might have gotten hit worse. On Saturday the focus here was on various apples, which he said were made uglier from a June hailstorm but tastier from the rain. “The hailstorm affected them cosmetically, but the rain makes them really juicy.”

Mini-pumpkins lived in a small crate on the ground in front of his stand at the market. “The little pumpkins are doing fine,” Schulze said. “The winter squash is a good indication of how the pumpkins will turn out. I think it will be a great year for pumpkins.”  

So when we will get our hands on these big pumpkins? Sit tight. Schulze says, “in a few weeks.”