Print This PageSeeking That Perfect Pumpkin
Seminis pumpkin breeder Bill Johnson misses Halloween nearly every year. "I'm rarely home for Halloween," Johnson said. "It just happens that the breeding cycle puts me in south Florida in the month of October. So I almost always miss Halloween at home."
Johnson spends his Halloween looking over fields of pumpkins, selecting those that will make better jack-o'-lanterns or Halloween decorations. Seminis has more than 10 commercial varieties of pumpkins, all of which were bred for ornamental characteristics. This is different from most of their other breeding practices which select for improved taste, nutrition and farmer benefits.
"You can eat the seeds, there's nothing wrong with them, they're good for you," Johnson said, but Seminis' Halloween-type pumpkins have not been selected for their eating qualities. There are other pumpkin varieties that are used for eating. One such variety called Snackjack was selected for its high production of seeds without shells, but these pumpkins aren't generally used for jack-o'-lanterns. "It's really quite unusual that Halloween type pumpkins would be used for pumpkin seed production, and it's unheard of that this pumpkin would be used for commercial pumpkin pie production." Most canned pumpkin is actually a closer relative to butternut squash, which is often used to make pumpkin pie.
At a Seminis research location in San Juan Bautista, California, is a pumpkin patch grown solely for picking pumpkins for jack-o'-lanterns. Starting about two weeks before Halloween, children from local schools take field trips to the Seminis pumpkin patch to learn about how a pumpkin grows on a vine, and to pick a pumpkin from the field to take home.
After years of visiting the Seminis pumpkin patch, Gabilan Hills teacher Christy Sondeno of Hollister, California, knows what her students want in a pumpkin. "They want a big one, or they want a real little one, there's no in-between," Sondeno said. "They don't want bumpy, they want smooth, and they don't want green ones. It has to be orange."
