Why pumpkins can pack a serious punch

Pumpkins are not just for fun - they're now serious business for farmers in Ireland

TEN YEARS AGO if you spotted a bright orange pumpkin complete with a hand-carved toothy grin in the window of a house you'd suspect - and probably rightly so - that the owner was an American, homesick enough to try to replicate a familiar Halloween tradition.

The stacks of bright orange pumpkins in supermarkets this week show how much has changed since then, and the trend has been good news for the growing number of farmers who have seen the potential in this most seasonal of crops.

Just outside Castlebellingham in Co Louth, at the Keelings-owned Van Dijk Nurseries, Bruce Bentley estimates that this year he'll get 40,000 pumpkins out of the four hectares he planted in May.

"It's been a difficult year," says the Zimbabwean who moved here two-and-half years ago. Last year was the Van Dijk Nurseries' first attempt to get in on this growing and lucrative home market and as Bentley describes it, it was a fast learning curve to produce 25,000 pumpkins. "It's all done by hand, so during planting and picking it's very labour intensive." The crop is planted in May and needs some water and plenty of sun to produce satisfyingly large, orange pumpkins. Our grim summer certainly didn't offer the ideal growing conditions.

"Pumpkins need sunshine or at least good light to get their colour up, and apart from all the rain there hasn't been a lot of light this summer," he says. "Getting the colour up is the big challenge for us this year."

The pumpkins are harvested from late September, then washed before being put into storage until needed in the shops in the weeks running up to Halloween. Tesco bought Bentley's entire crop and if there is any surplus, it'll be sold to small local shops.

He was a farmer in his native Africa for nearly 20 years and describes himself as "a refugee from Zimbabwe", saying that the job offer from Keelings gave himself, his wife and their three children a chance to escape that country's ever-worsening economic situation.

For him, the big difference between farming in Africa and Co Louth isn't as you might imagine crop variety or even sunshine. "There's more of a focus on labour management here," he says. "In Zimbabwe we had a lot people and not a lot of machinery, it's the opposite here."

Until the expansion into pumpkins, his main produce was lettuce. "In May, I brought the iceberg crew in a week earlier so they could plant up the pumpkins," he says. The exotically named "iceberg crew" turn out to be 18 seasonal workers brought onto the farm in the second week of May to plant iceberg lettuce. When the farm is at full tilt during the summer months he employs 50 people, in winter it's down to at most 10. "Getting into pumpkins was a way of spreading the risk, it was an opportunity and that's something farmers are always on the look out [for]."

According to a Bord Bia census in 2005, (the most recent available) there were 11 pumpkin-growers in Ireland, planting 22 hectares. For the food board, its continuing development means a welcome product generating "new" value in the Irish horticulture sector.

There is no doubt that by the time it reaches the kitchen table, a pumpkin is a fun product (well, as vegetables go), ready to be carved and the seeds separated from the slimy pulp and roasted. But it's not quite that simple down on the farm.

OUT ON GERRY ARNOLD'S 12-acre spread in Lusk, north Co Dublin, there isn't much of a warm orange glow about the place. He was one of the first farmers to see the potential in the American squash, but this year he has lost 75 per cent of his crop. He was aiming at producing 50,000. That's what was planted in the more hopeful month of May but the weather was poor and then the crop was hit with a serious bacterial infection that wiped out the bulk of it - and Arnold's profits.

"At this stage I'm looking at around 10,000 pumpkins, so I'll be lucky if I break even," he says. "I'm hoping to cover my costs." Dunnes Stores was taking his full order.

The arrival in great exotic-looking piles of very large, highly decorative pumpkins in our supermarkets has inevitably raised expectations. Absolute Organic, a Dublin-based company which delivers a box of mixed organic vegetables every week to 300 customers from Drogheda in Co Louth to Shankill in south Dublin, includes pumpkins on request all-year round. Imported from the Netherlands, they are the sweeter "standard orange", ideal for cooking and usually considerably smaller than a football. "We don't go in for the big blousy put-a-hole-in-them-and-stick-a-candle-in-them type," says Troy McPartling of Absolute Organics.

But try telling that to the little girl in Dublin last week whose mammy had promised the Halloween pumpkin would be arriving with the weekly delivery of organic veg. When Absolute Organic's delivery guy handed over the small pumpkin to the waiting child her face fell so fast and crumpled up into pre-howl mode that he thought his best option was to leg it as fast as he could into his van and get out of there.