Giant orange pumpkins with ghoulish grins have become a Halloween doorstep tradition but this year trick-or-treaters may be greeted with even spookier green-tinged jack-o-lanterns after a nightmare season for growers.
In Asda, pumpkin displays have signs telling shoppers “don’t worry if I’m slightly green, I will ripen at home and turn orange”.
With shoppers used to increasingly super-sized pumpkins, reviewers on supermarket websites also complain that this year’s batch don’t measure up.
“We had a cold, wet spring so the initial plantings on some farms failed,” said Julian Marks, the chief executive of the producer Barfoots. When the weather improved the fields were replanted but some did not have enough time to turn orange, he said. “There is quite a lot of green out there.”
“Right from the start of the season the weather has been not conducive to a bountiful harvest,” Marks continued. “In terms of ripeness, they’re perfectly good pumpkins and they’ll carve and look wonderful in the dark with a candle stuck in the middle, but they might not be 100% orange.”
It has been a year to forget for all farmers, not just those in the pumpkin business. England is said to have had its second-worst harvest on record after heavy rain last winter hit production of key crops, including wheat and oats.
Marks said Barfoots, which supplies 1m pumpkins to retailers, “scraped by” against the odds. “We’ve had a good crop but no surplus. We’ve had one or two shortages of speciality pumpkins but in general we’ve managed to meet demand.”
While it is usually zombies, witches and ghouls causing sleepless nights at Halloween, you could add a new slimy foe this year, with National Trust gardeners blaming the “slug army”, which thrived in the inclement weather, for disappointing pumpkin hauls.
The Royal Horticultural Society gardeners had a similar story. “Our pumpkin and squash harvest are below expectation by probably about 25% compared with other years,” said Peter Adams, a horticulturist at RHS Garden Rosemoor in Devon.
“The overall size of many of the pumpkins and squashes is considerably down on other years,” he said, citing “poorer than average light levels, fewer sunny days, and colder temperatures early on in the season”.
Jack Ward, the chief executive of the British Growers Association, said the rain in the early part of the growing season had caused problems for a lot of growers. “Pumpkins don’t like those conditions … slugs are a big problem too,” he said. “It’s by no means universal. Some people have had a good run but I think the general feedback is that it has been a difficult season.”
The grim dispatches from pumpkin patches have fuelled fears of shortages as the countdown to Halloween begins in earnest, but Tesco, the UK’s biggest retailer, has plenty, and price competition between the supermarkets is as fierce as ever.
“There’s a disconnect between what consumers are asked to pay and availability,” said Ward. “Retailers like to have a sort of consistent pricing and quite often, the price that consumers pay isn’t a true reflection of what it cost to put it on the shelf.”
If the shelves are bare when you get there, you could “cherish” a turnip instead, as Thérèse Coffey, the then environment secretary, suggested during last year’s salad shortage. You may even remember a time when turnips were the Halloween decoration of choice.
In previous years, English Heritage has revived this old practice, decorating its sites with the root vegetable, so should aficionados of the autumn celebration be carving turnips?
Dr Michael Carter, an English Heritage historian, said holiday traditions were always being reinvented. If I wanted to avoid getting a callus on my hand, it “would most definitely be a pumpkin”, he said, but opting for a turnip would “speak to older, indigenous traditions”.
“Carving a turnip would definitely turn it into a way of connecting with my childhood,” he said. “So much of what we think about calendar festivals as adults is nostalgia and connecting with our own past, as much as deeper trends in history.”
