Irene Behind Pumpkin Shortage
Jack-o-lantern artists will have to grin and bear it, but local pumpkin farmers fear they could be in for a rough patch -- haunted on the eve of their Halloween harvest by last month's crop massacre by killer Tropical Storm Irene.
"I had about 15 acres of pumpkins," said Sandy Williams, owner of Williams Farm in Deerfield, who'd planned to sell the gourds wholesale to at least 10 farmstands.
Williams, too devastated to even speculate on the financial hit he took from the one-time Category 3 hurricane, lamented yesterday he lost 75 acres of crops - primarily sweet corn - to flooding from the Deerfield River. "We're out of the corn business," he said. "Right now we're just trying to repair the land and remove silt and trees and debris."
"I think there's going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year," said Darcy Pray, owner of Pray's Family Farms in upstate New York, who stood by helplessly as Irene swept 15,000 to 20,000 of his pumpkins into Lake Champlain. "There's just none around."
Ruth Sterling, organizer of the annual Pumpkin Festival in downtown Keene, N.H., vows that won't be the case Oct. 22, when the city tries for a ninth world record by amassing at least 32,000 lighted jack-o-lanterns on a single day.
Sadly, Irene and the deluge of rain that preceded her in August claimed Keene's first attempt at growing 300 pumpkin plants to create a natural billboard for the festival. "Our pumpkins just shriveled up like some kind of blight," Sterling said. "They're grayish-brown. They're just so unhappy."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
