Washington produces millions of pounds of pumpkins every year. But what happens to those that don’t get picked from the patch and carved up during the Halloween season?
When Double R Farms closes its pumpkin patch for the year, the leftovers don’t go to waste. Instead, the fowl and fauna feast.
Down the gravel path leading from Geri Ruiz’s house to the Double R fields, crows and geese are flying overhead. They land in the fields of mowed-down pumpkins and corn, and they feast.
“You can see how my husband out there, he disked those up yesterday. This was our you-pick patch right in here,” Ruiz said. “So they're split apart so it's easier. You can see the crows landing on them right now.”
Ruiz said it will take about three weeks for the birds to finish off the pumpkins and corn.
“You can see that all the geese are loving it right now. They’ve already been over to the pumpkins,” Ruiz said. “Crows and the Canadian geese, they have a feast right now.”
Rabbits have also been enjoying the fields, and Ruiz and her husband have left vegetation behind to give them spots to hide from hawks.
At Sidhu Farms, leftovers sell for $2 each after Halloween.
Kamal Sidhu, who runs the farm with his family, said that lots of farmers buy the pumpkins to feed their animals.
“They'll come out and just get literally a truckload; fill up the bed of their truck, and they have food for a couple weeks,” Sidhu said. “And it's way cheaper than what animal feed is nowadays.”
Humans enjoy the pumpkins, too. Sidhu said some people buy them just to have the seeds.
Sidhu said whatever is left gets cut up to leave in the fields for the birds to feast on.
“We have a really nice amount of geese that'll come every year — hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of them,” Sidhu said. “So they'll just sit and feed there for weeks at a time.”
The rest decomposes and goes back into the soil, adding nutrients for next year’s crop.
