Pumpkins Worth More Than Their Weight

VILLALUZ DEL TAJO (Toledo, Spain). For forty years, the Robles family grew pumpkins for cooking: the butternut kind, the one used for soups and purées, which is the most widely planted in Spain. It is sown in May or June, harvested in September and October and sold by weight. “They paid us about twenty cents a kilo, and we were grateful,” recalls Encarna Robles, aged 63.

Three years ago, her daughter Laura suggested something crazy: turning one of their six hectares over to orange Halloween pumpkins, opening the farm at weekends in October and letting families pick their own straight from the plant. In the United States it’s called a pumpkin patch. In Spain it was already working on farms around Madrid and Toledo, with tickets costing between 20 and 23 euros and sessions selling out. One of them, in Ugena, was expecting around 4,000 visitors last season.

Here a ticket costs 21 euros and includes a pumpkin, a roasted corn cob, a trailer ride and a maize maze. Laura takes the money at the gate and drives the tractor. “One of these pumpkins weighs five or six kilos. Sold by weight, I’d get little more than a euro for it,” Encarna calculates. “People aren’t paying for the pumpkin. They’re paying for the afternoon.”

The change isn’t limited to one farm. Spain grows around 4,000 hectares of pumpkins, mostly in the east and in Castilla-La Mancha, and in 2023 its exports hit a record of more than 41 million euros, over double the 2014 figure, according to the exporters’ association FEPEX. One producer in Valencia said he had increased his Halloween crop by 50 to 60% and that, even so, it was never enough. All the same, Halloween pumpkins still take up very little land: most pumpkins end up in the cooking pot.

Not everyone at home was convinced. Grandad Fermín, aged 88, refused to take part. “Pumpkins are for eating, not for carving faces on,” he declared, and since then he has claimed that on Saturdays he goes to the village bar to play cards. What has become famous is the scarecrow in the maze. It wears a flat cap and an unlit pipe in its mouth and, the children swear, it moves: it has winked at some of them and pointed others to the exit when they were lost.

Laura shrugs when we ask her. “It’s made of straw,” she says. Encarna laughs and changes the subject. On Monday, with the farm closed, the scarecrow lies by the barn, without its cap or pipe. At that very time, Fermín sits at the barn door smoking his pipe, and Encarna has to brush, as she does every Monday, a few wisps of straw off his cap, which he says get stuck to it on the bus.

This year, the farm will also open on the night of 31 October, with torches. Encarna has done the sums: next year she’ll plant fewer cooking pumpkins and more orange ones. “We sell fewer kilos and earn more,” she sums up. Grandad has no opinion. But on Saturday afternoon, when the first coachload of families arrives, someone in the middle of the maze will point to the exit again.