By TIM ALEXANDER

Illinois Correspondent

PEORIA, Ill. — Illinois jack-o’-lantern growers are preparing for a late harvest of their ornamental pumpkin crop this year, due to spring planting delays caused by prolonged rains and flooding.

Though this is being reported by at least three prominent Illinois growers, never fear, Halloween enthusiasts: There should still be plenty of bright orange pumpkins to choose from this fall.

“My yield is down primarily because they were late getting in, and then it got so dry,” said Joe House, who operates The Pumpkin Place near Princeville, in Peoria County.

“This is the first year I had to do everything by hand; instead of using my John Deere I had to plant seed using a planter. That worked out okay, as weird as it was, but after I got the last group in I got a big rain and got really poor germination on those plants.

“And a lot of my pumpkins got so dry in the summertime that they never vined; there is a lot of bare ground out there. So for me, my ornamental crop is going to be down this year, even though I upped my acreage from 4.5 acres last year to 5.5 this year. It just got too dry,” he said.

House is no amateur horticulturist. His champion giant ornamentals, some reaching 1,000 pounds, have taken top honors at the Morton Pumpkin Festival, and his family orchard, converted into an agritourism business following his retirement as an educator, boasts more than 200 varieties of pumpkins, Indian corn, gourds, and more.

He keeps in contact through social media with a number of commercial giant pumpkin growers from around the state who have conveyed that this will not be a season during which any of them achieve their personal best, come weigh-in time.

“I lost some of my giants because they didn’t get enough water,” House said. “When they are stressed in conditions like that, if they don’t get water, they are dead.”

Because of the cost of production, he decided to focus on a small patch of his commercial giants, which require 50 gallons of water each per day, and allow nature to determine the fate of the others. “I used 37,000 gallons of water in July, just on Indian corn and pumpkins. That’s just a portion of the water I use.”

The summer’s drought-like conditions forced Mike Roegge, owner of Mill Creek Farm in Adams County, to address wilt on his pumpkins by installing a drip irrigation system that had been running around the clock, he told WGEM-TV of Quincy in mid-August. Before the heat, lingering rains washed out his initial crop of ornamentals, forcing late planting of the majority of his crop.

“The warmer temperatures we had early kind of allowed for the crop to catch up, but these cooler temperatures with highs in the 80s or 80 is not good for development, because you want some heat to grow those pumpkins,” he explained.

In Morton, located in Tazewell County, longtime grower John Ackerman of Ackerman Farms said though the season has been challenging, he still expects a good crop of ornamentals.

“It was a nightmare to get them in, because the spring was probably the worst I’ve seen in my farming career for getting crops in the ground,” said Ackerman, who also planted corn, beans, and wheat this year. “But I got them in and then it turned hot and dry, and pumpkins like that. They look, surprisingly, very good.”

Ackerman’s pumpkins managed to avoid diseases associated with a soggy spring and late planting, seeming to mature somewhat on schedule during the summer. If anything, he would like to see another round of rain before he completes his harvest.

“My only complaint is that the pumpkins are a week or two later than I would like them to be,” he added. “But be assured, we will have plenty of ornamentals to choose from on opening day, August 29.”

House said due to the lateness of the crop, he planned to begin his ornamental pumpkin harvest on August 26, just four days prior to the fall opening of The Pumpkin Place. “The thing I am hoping for is that I don’t lose many pumpkins due to fungus or rot from growing on saturated ground followed by a hot summer.”

Illinois ornamental growers are not unfamiliar with yearly production challenges. Last year’s crop was threatened by an unusually hot summer that caused pollination issues for some growers, and in 2017, growers in the northeast fought downy mildew.

Other common threats to Illinois pumpkins include Phytophthora blight, anthracnose, fusarium crown rot, gummy stem blight, and black rot, according to University of Illinois professor of plant pathology Mohammed Babadoost.

As for the expected field pumpkin – or canning pumpkin – harvest in Illinois, a call and email from Farm World to the Libby’s/Nestle production plant in Morton for a field update were not returned by press time. However, Babadoost had thoughts on it.

“2019 is going to be an average year in pumpkin production. We had a very wet year in the beginning and then a long, dry condition in some locations in Illinois,” he said. “I don’t think we are going to be short in pumpkin yield, but it is not going to be one of the highest-yielding years, either. Harvesting processing pumpkins is underway.”