By SHELLY STRAUTZ-SPRINGBORN
Michigan Correspondent

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan’s pumpkins look good, but there isn’t an abundance of them.

Last week, the state’s wholesale pumpkin harvest neared completion, with growers beginning direct sales, according to the agricultural summary from the Michigan Field Office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service: “Pumpkins were of excellent quality, but smaller than average size.”

Phil Cloud, who grows and sells pumpkins at Krazy Acres Pumpkin Patch in Ionia, said he has a “good crop” this year. “I hear everything about a pumpkin shortage and that kind of stuff, but my crop is excellent,” he said.

Cloud, who has raised pumpkins since 1992, said he talked with a grower south of his farm whose crop “was not so good. He got some vine borer in them and some other pests late in the season. He said he had about 30 percent of his crop that melted down. We had a customer in from the Flint area and she indicated down there they had a shortage.”

“I think what hammered a lot of people was the hot, dry spell in August. Things didn’t ripen. They just dried up and died. I consider myself blessed with irrigation, but that blessing does come with a cost. That cost is the difference for me in raising a good crop.”

Bernie Zandstra, Michigan State University Department of Horticulture professor and extension vegetable specialist, said this year’s crop “has colored up well and the quality looks good,” but “it is not a bumper crop. There may be a bit of a shortage. The ones I’m seeing are all very nice. They are good quality, but they are not very big,” Zandstra said.

During fruit set in July and August, he said hot temperatures caused blossom reversion. “When it gets really hot, we tend to have only male flowers,” he explained. “In my own plot work, we had very modest fruit set. When the temperature cooled off a bit during the middle of August, we started getting more fruit on.”
Zandstra said a variety of other factors also affects yields, but this year’s harvest looks better than last year’s.

“Last year, it was too cool and we had a lot of blossom drop,” he said. “Another factor is bees. There are so few wild bees anymore that in order to do a good job with pollination, farmers really have to bring in bees, and that can get pretty expensive.”

A nationwide shortage of pumpkins occurred in 2009 after record rains dumped twice as much precipitation as usual near Peoria, Ill., where most of the country’s pumpkins for consumption are grown. The shortage caused limited supplies of canned pumpkin, resulting in packers increasing their demand for pumpkin acreage this year.
Michigan had the third largest pumpkin crop in the nation last year, with 7,400 acres valued at $10.3 million, according to the USDA. Illinois topped the list with 14,300 acres, Ohio came in second with 7,400 acres and Pennsylvania, New York and California were ranked fourth through sixth, respectively.