Pumpkin search all wet this year

Prepare to pay plenty for pumpkins, people.

That'll be the case in the Fox Valley, which got a super soaking this summer, but elsewhere in the Northwest suburbs you might simply not have the same choices you had last year. And last-minute buyers could be out of their gourds looking for the perfect plump pumpkin.

August rains flooded some farms and stirred up diseases that are dwarfing and rotting the season staple even before they are picked. The rain may have been great for disease- resistant corn, but it ruined pumpkin crops and did the same for other vine crops such as squash, tomatoes and cucumbers.

Now, some growers who started the summer with hopes of a good yield are buying from farmers who didn't get as much rain.

"I just got a load from Green Bay," said Randy Gaitsch, who owns Randy's Vegetables, along Randall near Elgin.

Of the 35 acres he farms in Carpentersville along Randall, he usually harvests more than 100 bins of pumpkins. This year he's lucky to pull eight to nine bins out of the fields that were under water a little more than a month ago. Each bin holds 40 medium and large pumpkins

His wife, Christine, said prices will go up as a result.

"We were looking good up until August," Randy Gaitsch said. "Then, the rain came."

And with the 14 inches of rain that was registered at the airport in Rockford during August -- only 1987's August came close during the last half-century -- came Gaitsch's problems.

And when they did, Gaitsch and his colleagues called William Schoemaker. He's the senior research food crop specialist for the University of Illinois.

After inspecting hundreds of damaged acres, he found a number of fungi in the soil. The most prevalent is phytopatera. It lays in the soil, dormant for years, and doesn't hurt anything. In rainy months it wakes up and seeps into the roots of vine plants. The vines take it to the crop and infect it.

The problem doesn't go away after a year. It could take up to eight years for the soil to recover, Schoemaker said.

"That's why I tell people to rotate their crops. It was a tough season," Schoemaker said. "Some of our best soils are in low-lying areas, and they stayed wet the longest. We were wet from mid-July through August."

Nancy Didier of Didier Farms in Lake County's Prairie View said the rain affected the pumpkin crop there but didn't ruin it.

"It's not going to be a bumper crop, but we still have nice pumpkins," she said. "It wasn't terrible."

At Goebbert's Farm in South Barrington, there will be plenty of pumpkins this fall.

But getting them there wasn't as easy. Most of this year's pumpkins come not from Goebbert's fields but from Nebraska and New Mexico.

In past years, general manager Sue Murdock said, pumpkins sometimes come from other places. But usually it's to make sure there is enough in stock. This year, Goebbert's also had to get some gourds and squash from other places.

"In the 21 years I've been here, we've never had to get this much from other places," she said. "We are trying to hold the prices. They might be up a little bit, but nothing the customers should notice."

August rains were much heavier toward the Fox Valley and Rockford.

The 2,000 acres devoted to pumpkins in northern Illinois suffered significantly. Ten percent to 30 percent were a total loss, 60 percent were a serious loss and the rest were not damaged, Schoemaker said.

"It was a strange weather pattern," he said. "Any town north of Peoria was soaked. Peoria and towns south were dry. That's good, because pumpkins are a very drought-tolerant crop."

With all this said, the state will not have a pumpkin shortage for Halloween, Schoemaker said. Pumpkins are abundant in Southern Illinois. Farmers in the north will have to pay for them, though. And that cost will be passed onto customers.