Advice from a small town girl

I don’t know how I managed to reach this advanced age believing I had to do it all. Or that I could do it all.

I’ve never been able to decide if it’s an inherited trait or something I learned (or didn’t) along the way.

What I do know, and have already announced to all and sundry, is that I must give up my beloved pumpkin patch.

It’s so easy, in January when the world is dark and bleak, to allow myself to be seduced by seed catalog pictures of cheerful orange orbs. It’s easy to visualize them filling that dull winter landscape between the flowerbed and the bluff.

And it’s so hard to stop at one variety. How could I ever hope to decide? Which ones will grow to be the biggest? Which ones will have deep ribs and which will have a smooth surface? Which will be a deep orange-red and which will be nearly yellow? Or white? Or even green?

Which ones will look like Cinderella’s coach? Which will be tall and narrow, and which will be short and fat?

In order to answer those questions, you just have to buy the seed and plant the pumpkins.

So, somewhere along the line, my curiosity grew into about a half-acre of pumpkins.

When I first became obsessed by pumpkins, I thought we could have a pumpkin patch, where kids could come and pick out their own jack-o-lanterns right in the field. I even imagined a tractor-drawn wagon that they could ride around in.

Right.

What I didn’t consider back then was that to operate a pumpkin patch, you actually have to be there. And I have a tendency to be just a little busy.

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the completely unpredictable weather in Irby. One year my pumpkins were frozen solid by the end of September. The next, the vines were still green (and therefore impenetrable) at the end of October.

We discovered that the only way we would be able to market the pumpkins would be to pick them as soon as they were mature, and protect them as best we could from freezing.

If we could only magically jump from planting the pumpkins to bringing them to town.

Unfortunately, we have to weed. We can do that mechanically until the plants begin to vine, then it means picking up a hoe.

We have to water, which is also fairly easy until the plants get larger. By that time, you’d better have a permanent system in place.

And we harvest our crop by hand. That means bending over each pumpkin, checking to be sure it doesn’t have any bad spots, then clipping the stem.

The past couple of years we’ve taken over 6,000 pounds of pumpkins to town.

That’s a LOT of bending over, and I don’t bend so well any more.

Now, I suspect that I will still grow a few pumpkins.

It will be an exercise in self-control every year, having to decide which ones will be allowed into my downsized garden.

I LOVE bringing my pumpkins to town. It makes me happy to bring a bit of happiness to others. I enjoy visiting with customers, and I especially enjoy watching kids trying to decide which one(s) they want.

I want to thank everyone who has made this venture so much fun, from the returning customers to the FFA members who have helped me load the trailer for the past several years.

I’ll miss it.

But I suspect that I’ll find something else to keep me occupied.