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Page 8 University Daily Kansan, October 23, 1981
Inside
Chris Tramel, 16-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Carl Tramel, Lawrence,
examines a pumpkin before he purchased the pumpkin at Lawrence
Pumpkin picking is hard work. John Doty, DeSoto, rests on a load of pumpkins after working at Riverview Farms.
If the Great Pumpkin decides to descend into Marge Morse's pumpkin patch on Halloween night, he shouldn't have any trouble finding it.
Even though the pumkinpins should be easier to spot now, Morse, who operates the vegetable stand with her sister-in-law, Nancy Morse, said yesterday that the view would not be as spectacular as it had been in previous years.
But last night's predicted hard frost should have knocked most of the dead vines away, providing a flash of orange to drivers as they speed by on old K-10 highway.
Had Halloween come a week earlier, however, he may have bypassed Morse's pumpkin-sprinkle field in DeSoto because road brush was hiding it from view.
"We had a lot of moisture this year so the crops aren't as good this year," she said. "Plus the weather was so wet, we couldn't plant any big macs."
Big macs are a giant variety of pumpkins that weigh from 80 to 106 pounds.
"Those show up really well from the road—usually it's just solid orange," she said.
The biggest pumpkin this year weighed about 45 pounds and was about as big as an apple basket, Morse said.
Although crops from previous years have been more impressive, the Morse pumpkin patch is not always visible from the road.
Because crops must be rotated, Morse sometimes grows the pumpkins in a field behind the roadside stand, rather than across the street in the field she uses this year.
Morse said the best sales the stand ever had came on KU football game days before the new K10 highway was built.
"We had a big line of cars backed up because people were stopping," she said.
Morse, who says her 2,000-acre vegetable farm has been in the family for generations, said the family had been selling pumpkins for only five years.
"We've always grown pumpkins, but we haven't always been selling them to the public," she said.
One said many of her customers came from cities to pick numpkins as a family outing.
Some of the nearly 400 pumpkins harvested three times a week at Riverview Farm, DseDto, wait to be picked up and placed on a flat truck.
Customers can dart across the highway from the vegetable stand and have their pick of the patch for 10 cents a pumpkin pound.
"I guess they're just the same type of people who like to go out and cut down their own Christmas trees," Morse said.
During Halloween, the farm also has a lot of preschool visitors who come from nearby towns.
"A lot of those kids don't even know where a pumpkin comes from before they come here," she said.
The vegetable stand gets a big rush of customers during the last two weeks of October, although the pumpkins start rinening around the end of September.
"Around Halloween, business really picks up," Morse said. "You'd be surprised how many people will go out there and pick them in bad weather."
She said she did not know how many pumpkins were usually harvested each year, because "you don't go out and count pumpkins; you're talking about tons."
Morse said she didn't bake anything with the pumpkins herself, but she did offer some advice on carving out jack-o'lanterns.
"Remember not to carve it too far in advance," she said.
"And when you choose a pumpkin, get one that still has a stem on it. Otherwise, they'll start to rot."
Most of Morse's customers use the pumpkins for baking pumpkin pies or making jack-o'-lanters.
Photos by Earl Richardson
Story by Teresa Riordan
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