Don’t get George Janowiak wrong. An 868-pound pumpkin is one heckuva big pumpkin, the biggest he’s ever grown.
The thing is, it could have been even bigger. Back in midsummer, when the pumpkin was putting on 30 pounds a day, the Roselle resident thought he had a shot at the state record of 1,139 pounds.
“I think if we had gotten more natural rainwater, it would’ve been over a thousand pounds,” said Janowiak, 38, president of the Illinois Giant Pumpkin Growers Association. “You’ve got to remember, pumpkins are over 90 percent water. If you don’t have the water, you’re not going to get any size to them.”
Janowiak’s great pumpkin, it turns out, is an oversize but representative example of how this fall’s Illinois pumpkin harvest fared under extreme drought conditions. Hard statistics won’t be available until January, but early reports to the Illinois Department of Agriculture indicate that farmers are seeing smaller pumpkins–and maybe fewer as well.
Pumpkins, part of the squash family, grow well in dry weather, better than other crops like corn and soybeans. But without rain, they are lighter because they don’t retain as much moisture.
Still, agriculture spokeswoman Chris Herbert said shoppers won’t be disappointed if they’re looking to get a good gourd for a fat-faced jack-o’-lantern. For most people, a 20-pounder is a plump pumpkin.
“They’ll still be able to find big pumpkins if they’re looking for them,” she said. “They’re out there.”
With 12,500 acres on 475 farms devoted to growing pumpkins, and a cash crop valued at $15.8 million last year, Illinois is the leading producer in the nation, according to the state agriculture department.
More than 90 percent of the nation’s processed pumpkins–those used for baking–are grown in Illinois. Most of that is at Libby’s Pumpkin in Morton, the self-proclaimed pumpkin capital of the world.
“Pretty much any pumpkin pie that’s served in the United States–that pumpkin was processed in Illinois,” Herbert said.
Nestle-owned Libby’s Pumpkin plants about 4,000 acres of pumpkins in the Morton area each year, and its canned Dickinson pumpkin pulp fills the crust of 50 million pies a year. Nestle spokeswoman Roz O’Hearn said the drought had an impact on the size and abundance of pumpkins harvested by Libby’s, but the crop was enough to meet the demand.
“The fruit came in, it was very high quality and it was very good flavor,” O’Hearn said. “We believe as a country we’ll be in fine shape for the fall holidays.”
Due to the dry weather, vines that normally produce about four pumpkins were pumping out three at Hamman Farms, a family-owned farm with 20 acres of pumpkin fields near Joliet. “Basically the pumpkins, they look pretty good. There just aren’t as many of them,” Ryan Hamman said.
Selection could be limited as Halloween draws near, he said, but because the farm usually produces too many pumpkins, there should be plenty to go around.
The drought forced John Ackerman, who grew 130 different kinds of ornamental pumpkins this season on 25 acres near Morton, to try a few new techniques to come up with a yield that he says ended up smaller than usual, but still “surprisingly good, above expectations.”
Ackerman irrigated more than usual and scattered pumpkin seeds on the stubble of a harvested wheat field to make up for expected losses.
“Mid-July we were really concerned this could be a complete disaster crop,” Ackerman said. “In late July we caught one rain, and that one rain made all the difference.”
Aided by the warm fall weather, some of the pumpkins are ripening just about now–“which is incredibly late,” he said.
“We always tell people we have more blessings than we can count out here on the farm, but this year has been a challenge,” Ackerman said.
Janowiak also needed to use a lot of loving care to nurture an Atlantic-Giant seed into a monster almost 5 feet high and 165 inches in circumference.
He fertilized it, quenched it with water pumped from his back-yard garden pond and misted it whenever the summer temperature soared.
“It seems to me, the drought, as long as you were able to supply water, the heat conditions actually accelerate the growth of the fruit,” Janowiak said. Giant-pumpkin contests have become an increasingly competitive field in the last decade.
At a statewide weigh-off at Didier Farms in Prairie View this month, Janowiak’s pumpkin placed third, well short of the state record, and the world record of 1,469 pounds grown this summer by Larry Checkon of North Cambria, Pa.
Still, Janowiak is proud of his frightfully big pumpkin.
“I have the pumpkin out in my front yard, along with four others in the 400- to 500-pound range,” Janowiak said.
“I plan to have a fog machine and lights hooked up when I carve them.
“We also plan to make a few pies,” he said.
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jbiemer@tribune.com
