What is Halloween without pumpkins? The orange gourds won’t disappear this season, but an abbreviated growing season has led to a shrunken inventory for local farms that do Halloween business.
“We had a very late spring and cold weather this year,” said Steve Templeman, a marketer and family member at Maris Farms. “That translated into a long wait until we could plant our pumpkin crop.”
Maris, Farm Fresh Produce and Thomasson Farms each had delays of a month to a month and a half before they could plant their pumpkin crops. Each farm does a different percentage of their business based on the Halloween season and all experienced the same pumpkin shortage.
At one extreme end of the spectrum sits Maris Farms. Maris is not a year-round farm and does almost all of its business from the Halloween season.
About 95 percent of the business comes from pumpkin sales and sales of tickets to season events such as the Maris corn maze, Templeman said. The other part of the business comes from Christmas tree sales.
At the other end of the spectrum sits Farm Fresh Produce and Thomasson Farms, both major Plateau pumpkin sellers that maintain year-round businesses. Nevertheless, Farm Fresh gains about a third of its revenue from the month of October, manager Becky Cole said.
Though some crops, such as corn, have matured more slowly due to weather, most Farm Fresh produce comes from Yakima, which remained relatively free of rain and cold. Weather has nevertheless negatively affected the amount of foot traffic onto the outdoor market, Cole said, although she followed by saying the first week of the Halloween season is almost always slow.
Thomasson Farms runs a family dairy farming operation year-round and is relatively new to pumpkin sales, as it enters its fourth year of the latter business. The late spring forced the Thomassons to delay planting pumpkins, until they decided to trudge out into the rain on Father’s Day to get the seeds into the ground, Cathy Thomasson said. However, they were happy with the results.
“We got some really good size this year, considering,” Thomasson said.
Rainy weather has also caused some slowdown in their event foot traffic in the early part of the autumn season.
Weather takes a double-dip chunk out of business: pumpkin buyers are likely to participate in a hosted corn maze, hay ride or other event hosted at the site of the pumpkin field, and vice versa. So when bad weather prevents customers from coming, it hurts revenues twice.
Each farm is dealing with the difficulty in a different way. Maris has imported pumpkins from another field to supplement its homegrown supply. Farm Fresh is adopting a wait-and-see approach. Thomasson is banking on a feature it can offer that the other pumpkin farms can’t: tours of its operating dairy farm.
“We love our field trips,” Thomasson said. “Our goal is to get kids on a farm and seeing what it is like.”
Maris Farms is at 24713 Old Sumner-Buckley Hwy. Farm Fresh Produce is at 24015 state Route 410, just east of the Bonney Lake city limits. Enumclaw’s Thomasson Family Farm is at 38223 236th Ave S.E.
