You can buy a pumpkin just about anywhere in October, from a roadside stand to a big box store. The ones used for carving are called Connecticut Field Pumpkins. Thousands are grown every year. But there's another minor sector of the pumpkin market, sold online and by word of mouth. WUWM's Ann-Elise Henzl visited a specialty pumpkin farm in Racine County.
Driving along Highway 20, on the outskirts of Racine, you used to see apple orchards and Christmas tree farms. Now it's more common to come across car dealerships and fast food restaurants.
But some land still is used for agriculture, such as pumpkins grown at the Sabol Family Farm. They don't resemble jack-o'-lantern pumpkins. These look more like Cinderella's carriage, with curlicue tendrils, and a more squat shape.
Joe Sabol: "The diameter is larger than the height of the fruit, whereas with the traditional Connecticut Field Pumpkin, the diameter is smaller than the height."
Ann-Elise Henzl: "Because you're looking for a big carving surface?"
Sabol: "Yeah, exactly, exactly."
Joe Sabol grew up on this property when it was an apple orchard. Now, he grows pumpkins from heirloom seeds that can be traced back to the 1700s. He raises several hundred exotic pumpkins a year.
"I've got yellow, there's a variety called 'Halloween in Paris,' the skin is lemon yellow color, the 'Rouge Vif d'Etampes,' red wine -- and I've gotten some that are beautiful dark fire-engine red -- 'Fairytales,' they're a mocha brown, it would be like if you had coffee and put in some cream," Sabol says.
Sabol leads me through cultivated rows of organic pumpkin plants to show me what's left of the crop. We step gingerly, to avoid getting tangled in thick, trailing vines. Sabol reaches down to lift a medium-sized sage green pumpkin.
Sabol: "They're quite heavy, here's one here, you know, feels like a bowling ball."
Henzl: "Oh! Heavier than a bowling ball!"
Sabol: "And it's like a watermelon, if they are heavier than you think they are, then there's a lot of sugar and other good nutrients in there."
The nutrients are important because Sabol's pumpkins are often used for cooking. He pulls on workers' gloves, and produces clippers, snipping the pumpkin off the vine.
"I'm going to cut that and, I love to cook, but I think the bottom of that is going to be really solid, so I'll put that there," Sabol says.
Some chefs in Milwaukee use Sabol's pumpkins in stews and ravioli.
Joe Sandretti: "He is always pushing us to cook with them, and I'm like 'No, let's just keep them out on the shelf.'"
Joe Sandretti is chef at Buckley's Kiskeam Inn, in downtown Milwaukee. He points to about 20 of Sabol's pumpkins adorning the dining room. They're lined in a row, high, atop the back bar.
"They're just beautiful, we think they're beautiful, that's why we're drawn to them," Sandretti says.
The organic, heirloom pumpkins are quite a bit more expensive than the more plentiful jack-o’-lantern variety. Joe Sabol sells them for $20 or more apiece. Yet the Racine County farmer won't make a living off his crop, unless he squeezes more of them onto his land.
Sabol considers farming his second job. He also runs a chemical consulting business. But Sabol says he enjoys the time on the farm, because it gives him a chance to connect with nature.
"Every year I see the monarch butterfly migration, I see a lot of butterflies coming through here, the bees coming through here, the songbirds, just seeing cardinals sitting in that tree waiting for me to turn around to go have some more seeds, or things like that," Sabol says.
Sabol adds that farming is good exercise. He does the majority of the labor himself.
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