Growing Pumpkins For Your Holiday Needs

Pumpkins play such a big part during the holiday season, whether that’s as ornamental decorations for Halloween, or pumpkin pies during Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nathan Johanning, University of Illinois Extension, said there are more types of pumpkins than people may realize, and that starts with research and development.

“In multiple areas, a lot of it has to do with new varieties, especially when it gets into the realm of the ornamental side, which includes the jack o lanterns and any of our various colors," Johanning said. "A lot of that happens within different seed companies all around the United States that supply seeds for the area. So, a lot of that is because they're working hard to breed and develop different varieties to give new colors, new things. I mean, we have pumpkins that are now a really golden yellow color. We didn't have that a few years ago, so that's a large part of it.”

There Are Several Pumpkin Varieties

He noted there are a lot of similarities between growing pumpkins and other types of commodities.

“At the University of Illinois, we host trials looking at varieties, but also we've looked at different ways to manage weeds, different conservation practices like utilizing cover crops, and how that can be adopted into a pumpkin system, and things like that," Johanning said. "So, there's a large gamut of things. We also have a plant pathologist in Champaign-Urbana who works exclusively on disease management. Pumpkins are susceptible to many diseases, including powdery mildew and others that can cause the leaves to die and the plant to die. There are things that can cause the fruits to rot.”

When Is Mechanization Used In Harvest?

And when it comes to harvesting pumpkins, Johanning said there's a lot of variety there as well.

“So, when it comes to processing, those are the ones for the canned pumpkin," he noted. "Those are mechanically harvested. They do have a way that they basically slide them all into what I call a windrow, or think about taking all those fruits and sliding them into a big row. And then, they do have a harvesting machine that is able to pick them up and load them into wagons and trailers, where they are headed off to facilities to be processed. On the ornamental side, we don't have any kind of mechanical harvesting. The closest we may have is some harvest aids. Maybe they use some conveyors and things to help workers, and they pick the pumpkins to help get them to a centralized location. But everything else is hand-cut harvested.”

Pumpkin Production By The Numbers

When it comes to top pumpkin producers in the country, Illinois is the "pumpkin state", with 18,777 acres, while Indiana and Texas round out the top three. As far as Northwest pumpkin production, according to 2022 numbers: