Gourd standard

MOSES LAKE — They’re everywhere this time of year, those round orange gourds. As soon as October rolls around, commercial pumpkin patches start doing a business as brisk as the weather. But home gardeners can grow the decorative – and often tasty – gourds as well.

“I wanted more variety than just the orange ones, you know?” said Barry Sterner of Moses Lake. “I wanted plenty of the orange ones because that's what everybody has memories of carving, but we grew them with the intention of people coming out and having like a beautiful place where they can take pictures.”

Barry and his wife Rebecca began growing the pumpkins last year for fun, and this year they’ve added U-pick pumpkins to their floral business Rue & Sage. They’ve got about an acre planted in all kinds of pumpkins and they price them based on size.

Most people are familiar with the biggish orange jack-o’-lantern pumpkins and maybe a few little decorative ones, but pumpkins actually come in a really wide range of shapes, sizes and colors. Part of the fun is the names of the varieties, Barry said.

“Some of them are called Hulk, some of them are Thor,” he said. “Seriously, they have Marvel names. Whenever somebody comes up with a new variety, they get the creative freedom to make up their own name for it. I've got some of them that are called grizzly bears. They're a little bit more tan and have little warts on them. My favorite, personally this year, were the silver moons. They're a little bit lighter blue, almost like a light gray. The (Dill’s Atlantic), which are huge. They almost have a pink hue to them.”

“They’re the ones that people use to grow the 2,000-pounders, the record pumpkins,” Rebecca said.

Some of them are better for pies than others, the Sterners said. The orange jack-o’-lantern kind are good eating, but some of the others are even better, like winter luxury, which looks like it has a thin netting over the outside but the inside is velvety and well-suited to pie. Others have different uses, like birdhouse gourds.

“(Birdhouse gourds) are kind of round on the bottom and then they have a really skinny long neck,” Barry said. “They dry out almost like wood and people will hollow them out and turn them into literal birdhouses.”

A good start

Pumpkins aren’t difficult to make grow; in fact, it can be hard to keep them from taking over. But there are some techniques for getting a better crop, starting with the planting. The time to plant pumpkins is in the late spring and early summer if you want to have a crop around Halloween.

“Right after Memorial Day, I think is like a good target,” Barry said. “Some varieties take up to 120-125 days, some varieties are like 80, some are 65.”

“I plant in June,” said John Hall, owner of Jack's U-Pick Pumpkins & Strawberries in Ephrata. “You can plan really up until mid-June. The soil’s good and warm and they come on fast enough. But if you plant them much sooner you'll start getting a lot of rot.”

Having the right seeds helps too, the experts agreed.

“You want to start with a good seed,” Hall said. “Get a good hybrid variety, which most of them are, start with that.”

The little packets of seeds you find in the grocery store will work, Hall said, but most of them are open-pollinated and don’t meet the germination and quality requirements for commercial growing. Hall buys most of his seeds through Harris Moran, he said. Barry Sterner said he gets good seeds from Osborne Seed, in Mount Vernon in northwestern Washington.

“Oftentimes they'll have an organic variety, a treated one that has a coating to protect the seed,” he said.

Making them grow

It doesn’t take a whole lot of seeds to get a crop started, Barry said. He recommended starting off with two or three seeds in each hole.

“Once you have a couple of them coming up, you know, you kind of guess which one's the stronger one, and you pull the other one to thin it,” he said.

“I definitely think that's important, because this is a big seed,” Rebecca agreed. “And insects really like that. So we always plant two or three per hole. For home gardeners, I would definitely do that.”

The Sterners use drip irrigation, they said, which not only uses less water than overhead sprinklers, it also discourages and cuts down on powdery mildew, which can form when water evaporates off a pumpkin.

“I think it also helps keep the squash bugs down,” Rebecca said. “A lot of people in the Basin have issues with squash bugs. They can sting the blooms so you won't get as good a pumpkin yield. They often will come out and like basically poop all over the pumpkins if you get too many in there. They're just gross. They’re a yucky bug.”

“Watch out for squash bugs,” Hall said. “You won’t avoid them, so don’t even think you’re going to avoid them. If you’re doing something organic in a home garden you might be able to pick them off to keep them from devastating your pumpkins, but commercially or in a large patch you’re going to have to spray.”

“We actually did not spray for the bugs out there at all this year,” Barry Sterner said. “We wanted to make sure that the blooms were getting pollinated by bees and oftentimes even if you're trying to spray at night, bees like to bed down in the in the blooms, so we did our best to make sure that we weren't (harming them).”

Next year’s pumpkins

The Sterners are only on their second year, but they plan to rotate the pumpkins so that last year’s row of crops is this year’s walkway between the rows. They’re also always looking for new varieties to experiment with.

“The great thing about pumpkins is, you can easily you find a pumpkin you love and save some of the seed from it and reuse it,” Barry said.

“It might not come back true, depending on how it got pollinated,” Rebecca said. “That seed might not be that variety. It might be something different, or maybe a throwback to different breedings.”

“That's how a lot of new varieties get created, as they cross-pollinate,” Barry said. “A lot of times they take the flower and they mix the pollen with another flower, and once the thing grows, who knows what you're gonna get?”

Joel Martin may be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com