This isn’t your mother’s pumpkin. Across Massachusetts, piles of light blue, pale green, peach and warted pumpkins are selling fast at farms, supermarkets and garden stores. On suburban home stoops and city apartment building steps alike, they’re perched as colorful displays, often next to old-school carved Jack O’Lanterns.
Many who don’t own them — particularly, this reporter — wondered: what are those? And why?
At Wilson Farm in Lexington, the so-called “funky pumpkins” have been in stock for 20 years. But they’ve never grown this much variety, or sold so many, according to Lauren Wilson, a fifth-generation family farmer.
It used to just be the Cinderella pumpkin: that short, fat stackable pumpkin that’s orange-red in color, and the blue pumpkin, both of which are edible. But local farmers reported that, especially since the pandemic, customers have been looking for more fun autumn decor. And seed specialists are creating new hybrids, too, in the pursuit of the ever-odder gourd — even ones that aren’t edible.
“It’s gotten to the point where people look now for what we call ‘ornamental squash,’ and we try to bring in something new and different every year,” Wilson said.
This year’s new oddities are the “dinosaur egg” squash, which is orange, green and purple with bumps all over, and the “popcorn pumpkin,” which is a delicious yellow color — also with bumps all over. And it really does look like a bowl of popcorn.
Wilson gave GBH News a tour-du-squash.
“These are the popcorn right here. They’re fantastic,” she said. “They are warty and brand new this year.”
There’s also the “warty goblin,” an orange pumpkin with green bumps for those who are traditionalists but want a spin.
Amy Shay of Lexington saw a $25 per cart sale on the Wilson Farm Instagram, and stopped by with her mom, who was visiting from Seattle. When GBH News interviewed them, their cart was almost overflowing. Shay’s bought a few in the past, but never this many.
“I just think it adds such unique interest to our porch. And then I’m going to do some stacks in my planters,” Shay said. She thinks her three children will be excited to see them.
“They're probably going to get a kick out of all these pumpkins,” she said, laughing.
Ken Crouch, of Cambridge, has never bought a weird pumpkin and was just checking out the Wilson Farm pumpkin wall when he spotted a warty goblin variety called the “Knucklehead.”
“The bumps all over it, it's really quite interesting. So I'll put it on my porch and see what people say,” he said.
Wilson Farm grows a substantial amount of its own squash, both in Lexington and on its almost 600-acre farm in Litchfield, N.H.
Farmers are starting to notice customers want them, Wilson said.
“Now people are growing non-edible squashes and gourds for the pure sake of decorating, which 20 years ago wouldn't have been heard of!” she said.
Seed specialists are creating hybrids of the squash too, she said.
A lot of the squash come from the same family tree: the Cucurbita maxima. The massive pumpkins strewn across the front pages of newspapers are that species, but the weird squash are, too.
“It has the most diversity in shape, I think, or one of the most diverse shapes, because in this group is where you get the flat disc-like pumpkins that you can turn into stackers, which are very popular right now,” said Benjamin Phillips, a vegetable specialist at the Southwest Michigan Research & Extension Center.
The pastel-colored pumpkins of green, blue and pink are from that species, too. The warted ones are often a spinoff from that branch called Galeux.
“There’s this is a place in France that's well-known for growing pumpkins and they’re really mangy looking. So they call it ‘mangy man,’ but it's bred to be eaten and it just has those quirky warts all over it,” Phillips said.
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Wilson said the funky squash love grew exponentially when families were homebound during the pandemic. But it’s really cemented as a staple this year. Wilson Farm builds a massive squash-shelf on the side of its store every other year, and in 2022, the funkiest ones are displayed prominently.
At Volante Farms in Needham, ornamental squash are almost all gone. Teri Boardman Volante agreed: sales really picked up in the pandemic. In 2019, her farm sold 17,000 pounds of weird pumpkins. It doubled in 2020 to 35,000. And this year exceeded the 2020 benchmark, with 37,000 pounds sold so far.
“We are pretty well sold out of the stackable ones. We have a few warty pumpkins left right now,” said Boardman Volante, the farm’s owner. Stackable squash were especially popular, and she buys them from local growers like Araujo Farms in Dighton and Wards Berry Farm in Sharon.
“They’re kind of more flat and disc-shaped. They stack really well on top of each other, Kind of how you would do it with rocks at the beach. People make like small totems out of them and stack them on top of one another in front of their houses — it kind of carries you through the entire season of fall, not just Halloween.”
Kids love the weird pumpkins. At weekend festivities at area farms, children can be spotted running their hands over the bumps or dragging their parents over to see.
“They love touching them and saying how funny they look,” Boardman Volante said.
Despite all the newfangled gourds, tradition isn’t squashed.
“Orange pumpkins were so far and away the most popular,” Wilson said. “But now people will fill whole carts up with squashes and gourds.”
