CIRCLEVILLE, Ohio — The drought in southeastern Ohio has claimed another victim: pumpkins.

George Lohstroh farms 125 acres along the Madison-Pickaway County border near Mount Sterling, Ohio. The pumpkin patch at his farm along Route 56 spans14 acres. Lohstroh said the current conditions reflect the worst drought he has experienced in his 40 years of farming.

 “Each year brings challenges,” said Cristin Lohstroh, George’s daughter, who helps manage the farm. “This year just happens to be no rainfall so we’re able to mitigate some of that through hard work and effort into irrigating our crops. We do have a good crop of pumpkins. It’s just been a lot of late nights and no suppers when you have to keep the irrigation rolling.”

 “Yeah, it’s taken a tremendous amount of diesel fuel, gasoline and time,” George adds.

 Water from a well that taps into nearby Darby Creek has provided irrigation all summer, especially as the drought worsened. George stressed the importance of watering the pumpkin leaves that absorb nourishing sunlight and also protect the pumpkins from sunburn damage.

 “Leaves that received insufficient moisture are essentially fried and have dropped or drooped down, and the sun did wind up burning them,” he said.

 While irrigation paid off with a respectable patch of pumpkins, including 40 varieties in all shapes and sizes not everyone was so lucky. 

 For more than a decade, southeast Ohio residents have been visiting Libby’s Pumpkin Patch outside Albany for hay rides, corn mazes and, of course, pumpkins. But not this year. Libby’s Pumpkin Patch in Meigs County announced it will not open for the season due to the drought.

 “We doubled down, invested in re-planting and diversifying, prayed for the remnants of at least one tropical storm, but it was just not meant to be this year. So, we will take the year off, re-group and try to stay cool,” Libby’s said in a Facebook post.

 “We had good moisture and good rainfall until May, and then the spigot got turned off,” said co-owner Kevin Lewis. “We even planted our sunflowers three times, and we still have nothing.”

 The farm has been in Rachel Lewis’ family for six generations and the last time anyone can remember a drought this bad was in 1988.

 “People who remember the ’88 drought say this is much worse,” Lewis said. “Mid to late July, we started getting some rain in ’88, but this hasn’t been the case now.”

 This week would typically be a time to pick pumpkins for Roberts’ farm Market in Pickaway County, an expected 7,000 to 10,000 pumpkins. Instead, farmers said they would not be able to fill their market stand due a destroyed crop.

 “Usually by now, this field would be coated in orange, or you’d be able to see the pumpkins by now, but you see most of the plants don’t have anything,” said Stacy Pasco, co-owner of Roberts’ Farm Market. “We planted two and a half acres and they just weren’t growing like they were, and then in August it just shut off completely. We weren’t getting any rain here.”

“It’s depressing,” Pasco said. “Fall is our favorite season, and it’s our customers’ favorite season.”

At Monnin’s Fruit Farm in Montgomery County pumpkins will be available to customers, just not as many to choose from.

“It seemed to be a good growing season, but the last two months of this drought has affected all the fall crops,” said farm owner Glenn Monnin. “We’ll see an early end to the season this year, but we’ll still have pumpkins up until Halloween.”