FROM SHOP BOSS TO PUMPKIN KING
HALLOWEEN celebrations have come into their own over the past decade with pumpkin patches popping up across Wales and spooky activities busting out of diaries during October.
But in this most unusual of years, one man is set to make pumpkinlovers’ dreams come true with his Pumpkin Mobile.
Gavin Fisher has been selling and delivering thousands of pumpkins – some of them weighing four stone – over the past seven years, and he’s definitely going to be busy this year with hundreds of families unable to travel to pick-your-own pumpkin patches outside lockdown areas.
The owner of the Spar in Ely, Cardiff, he first attracted attention by selling giant pumpkins from his mate’s farm at the shop, which he has run for 20 years.
Then, when he bought an orange Transit van for the shop, daughters Esmee and Martha, then four, gave him the idea for the Pumpkin Mobile.
Gavin, 42, who lives in Taff’s Well, said: “The kids said, ‘Daddy, you should make it into a Halloween van’ – so I did, for a joke – and then just thought I’d start selling pumpkins from the van, and kids love it, they love seeing the van and all the pumpkins. “So I just kept going.”
Esmee and Martha, now 10, have certainly made every October a lot more fun for their dad, who admits he’s not too hot at carving, and is kept going by his mum making pumpkin soup from the recycled squashes.
The reaction to the Pumpkin Mobile is what makes Gavin enjoy his extra job.
“Sometimes the kids run after it,” he said. “They laugh and point, it’s really good fun and the kids love to jump in the van.
“I keep it going for them but I love it as well. I love seeing the children have a laugh. I do it for the fun, to be honest with you.”
The van can carry 150 pumpkins, of all shapes and sizes, and as the month goes on Gavin can even make two trips a day to the farm where he gets them, to make sure everyone is Halloween ready.
“Frankie and Benny’s normally have a load off me, the local police take a load off me to keep the kids off the street, I donate them to whatever charity is about, really,” he added.
This year Gavin said he was contacted earlier than usual about pumpkins – which he often sells around Upper Boat, near Treforest, or, if there’s enough demand, he’ll come to other neighbourhoods to drop off.
“More people have contacted me earlier, usually the last two weeks it goes crazy, because the pumpkins don’t really last that long,” he said.
“I am a big fan of Halloween, it’s a warm-up to Christmas that doesn’t cost much money and is good fun.
“I’m really tired by the end of the month because some of the pumpkins are up to four stone in weight and I am moving them around.”
This year, too, Gavin – who gives details of the van’s whereabouts on The Pumpkin Mobile’s Facebook page – is planning on getting a contactless machine to make the Pumpkin Mobile Covid-safe, but the two-metre socialdistance rule means he won’t be able to load up people’s cars.