Pumpkin pickin’ time
Families crowd pumpkin patches to enjoy fall festivities
LA UNION —For New Mexico pumpkin growers, fall is a festive season as their fields fill with varieties like the popular Cinderella, the white “ghost” or “magic lantern,” which is perfect for carving.
This year farmer Cole Viramontes is also trying a new variety called the “magic wand.”
“Everything has its own Halloween kick to it,” said Viramontes, a third-generation family farmer and father of two in the Deming area.
“Pumpkins aren’t a huge money-making crop but my wife likes to grow them and I have kids,” he said.
The farm’s mainstays are watermelons and chile. Pumpkins help the Viramontes extend the harvest season and employ more of their workers longer. People are the best pumpkin pickers.
“They haven’t made a machine that’s delicate enough with the pumpkin to not destroy it or
injure it in any way to get it out of the field,” Viramontes said.
Also, it takes “a human to eye” the best ones in the field, he said.
There are about 143 farms in the state growing pumpkins commercially, according to the New Mexico Department of Agriculture. Viramontes Farms supplies stores in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and other parts of the Southwest.
Plenty of families prefer to pick their pumpkins from a field rather than a store bin. Pumpkin patches across the state are crowded this time of year. McCall’s Pumpkin Patch in Moriarty also offers hayrides, a huge corn maze and farm animals for kids to pet and feed. Wagner Farms in Corrales has pumpkin picking and an apple orchard as well as a vineyard and petting zoo. Farms often pair pumpkin patches with corn mazes.
In southern New Mexico the most popular pumpkin patch is in La Union. “We have pumpkins in the thousands out there,” said Lucy Sondgeroth, owner of a pumpkin patch and corn maze in the tiny town of La Union.
The 20-year-old La Union Corn Maze attracts families from across the state line in Texas as well as across the border from Mexico who come to enjoy the fall festivities.
“We get a lot of the private schools from across the border,” Sondgeroth said. Schools make it a field trip and each student leaves with a pumpkin.
The fall festivities include a ride in a wagon pulled by a tractor out to the enormous pumpkin patch. “We wanted to bring the kids and pick pumpkins as a family,” Gerardo de la Fuente said.
“We want a big white pumpkin. Probably because it’s unusual,” said his wife, Leticia Mendoza. The couple from Ciudad Juarez brought their 2-year-old son Gerardo Junior and 7-year-old daughter Isa to La Union.
“It’s like picking out your own Christmas tree instead of buying it in the lot,” said Jordan Olsen, who was walking through the pumpkin patch, with her husband, their 4-month-old daughter and the baby’s grandmother. They were looking at traditional orange pumpkins.
While some pick just one, others pack their trunks with pumpkins.
“They’ll take a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins, orange and white ones and Cinderella ones, green ones and little bitty ones,” Sondgeroth said. “I imagine some of those people just want to decorate like crazy.”
She and her husband grow 17 varieties of pumpkins.
“My favorite is the Cinderella ones. They look a little prehistoric but they make the best pie and the best cookies and the best bread because they’re super dense inside and there’s no waste at all. It’s all good stuff,” she said.
The popularity of pumpkins is at its peak now, but after Halloween, Christmas decorations take over. Attendance during the seven weeks the corn maze and pumpkin patch is open in La Union tops 65,000 a year. When the Sondgeroths close the corn maze and patch in early November they donate pumpkins that haven’t been picked to area food banks. It’s a perfect way to usher in the season of giving.