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It’s Good Year For Pumpkins, Charlie Brown

Pumpkins are often considered a drought resilient crop, but the combination of extreme heat and low rainfall have taken their toll on Missouri pumpkins.
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Pumpkin farming will be great this season.

Missourians can expect a pretty good local pumpkin crop this fall.

David Trinklein, a plant sciences professor at the University of Missouri. He said last year’s heat and drought was tough on pumpkins. This summer was better, even though farmers had to plant a little later than normal due to all the spring rains. “I don’t know that bumper crop is the right word, but nonetheless it’s a large crop of pumpkins,” Trinklein said. 

Trinklein said pumpkins need dry conditions in late May and early June, and then about an inch of rain per week throughout the life of the crop.“We didn’t have that exactly, but on the other hand, pumpkins relatively speaking are fairly drought tolerant so the few times we did have lack of rainfall, they were able to handle it,” Trinklein said. The moisture, he said, is more important when the pumpkins are putting on size in July.

Dianna Koenig from Perryville Pumpkin Farm said her crop has been OK. During last year’s drought, she received rainfall at just the right time and she had a great crop then. This year she describes as “average to good.”

“This year the spring was pretty wet, so we could not get them planted quite as soon as we wanted. Then here at the end of the summer, when they really take off and grow, that’s whenever it got dry. We plant 94 different varieties, but some of our varieties that mature at the end of the season did not get as big as they could have,” Koenig said.

But some of her pumpkins did, apparently, thrive in this summer’s conditions. One reached 172 pounds.