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Months of work
Pumpkin prep begins in early May, with irrigating and fertilizing the soil; seeds are planted between mid-June and July 1. “Part of that is because of the different maturities,” Bishop said, “and then part of it is because we’re open for about six weeks before Halloween. We don’t necessarily want everything ready to pick on the 15th of September, when the bulk of our guests want to pick pumpkins in October.” Most years, he sells well in excess of a million pounds of pumpkins, each weighing anywhere from 5 to 80 pounds.
Wayne Bishop’s farm features pumpkins of all sizes and colors, not to mention pie.
Gourds aplenty Wayne Bishop looks forward to a great pumpkin season
Story by Kevin Hecteman • Photo by Ching Lee
Before long, people will be trekking to Bishop’s Pumpkin Farm in Wheatland, where Wayne Bishop stands ready to welcome legions of visitors looking for their perfect Halloween pumpkins. Or pies. Or both. Bishop’s family has been operating the patch and its associated attractions since 1973, and farming in the area since long before then. His grandparents came to California from Nebraska during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. “They were dairy farmers right here in the same area,” Bishop said. His late father, Bill, kept farming and nowWayne and his sons carry on. But it was Wayne’s mother, Sandy, who got the family into growing gourds. “My mother had been a teacher, and she planted the first pumpkins because she thought maybe we could get kids to come out on a field trip. That’s what our whole business started from,” he said. “We just consider ourselves so lucky that we can do something for a living that people really enjoy. You can see that in their faces. There just aren’t a lot of things you can do for a living where your customers tell you how much they enjoy it.”
A slice of farm life
It used to be that most everyone either lived on a farm or had a relative who did, Bishop said. “We have rapidly grown out of that,” he said. “Today, most kids do not have a relative that owns a farm that they can visit. We just consider ourselves extremely fortunate that many people have decided that our farm is that farm that they visit. We think that people still have an instinct to go out and harvest something in the fall.”
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September/October 2021
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