The UK’s largest specialist pumpkin grower was due to complete his harvest of 500 acres of the autumn crop this week.
David Bowman calculates he has produced some 3-3.5 million pumpkins this year in what started as a very dry season. “We plant at the end of May and it was extremely dry. I drill most of the crop and only plant about 40 acres of modules. Once it started to rain in June, the crop germinated well and growth got away all right. Because we grow on Lincolnshire silt, the soil was fairly moist.”
Yields and sizes this year are “fairly reasonable”, according to Bowman, and the cool damp August “does not seem to have done the pumpkins any harm.”
As well as supplying supermarkets and wholesalers, Bowman also exports his pumpkins to the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland.
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