Farmers managing a peculiar pumpkin season

It's harvest time at Lester's farm, and fall means lots of pumpkins. But these aren't the pumpkins these farmers expected. So this year, unfortunately due to the cold summer, everything's a little bit late, and you see behind me there's still a lot of green. Here we are at the end of September, and we never have pumpkins left in the field this time of year, usually. Down the highway in Conception Bay South, another farm is also having a weird pumpkin harvest. harvest season past we planted about 3,000. We did not get that because I jumped the gun and planted a little bit too early and that cold snap that we had during the spring took out some of my pumpkins. We did have some casualties. So why did these two pumpkin farmers have harvest headaches this year? Well it comes down to climate change. 2025 was one of the hottest and driest summers Newfoundland and Labrador has ever seen but this year was colder. Porter says it threw her pumpkin plants out of whack. So last year we planted it from seed and it worked really well so this year I said oh it worked so well last year I'm gonna try it again this year it's so much easier than you know starting in a greenhouse that was a mistake but the ones that did grow as you can see behind us some of them are very large so the ones that survived that snap and that that bit of cold, they've done very well. The rest sort of perished. And back at Lester's, the colder temperatures at the start of summer made planting seeds challenging. You know, you're putting seeds in the ground, plants in the ground. It was so cold, it's like they weren't growing at all. But the biggest challenge with climate change isn't the hot or the cold. It's the unpredictability. One climate scientist says the peculiar pumpkin harvest is a prime example of what's to come. You used to make plans around what you understood to be a fairly stable average climate. Those expectations kind of have to be readjusted now. And it's hard to plant for a season that you've never experienced before. And we're starting to see more and more seasons that we haven't experienced before. I recognize it's a challenge for farmers, and it's unfortunately probably not going to get much easier in the near future. Now with Halloween just around the corner, Porter and her pumpkins are at the finish line. the farmers market but as she sells off this year's crop she doesn't know what kind of pumpkins will pop up out of the ground next year. All these traditional things that we grow we just have to change it up and we have to rethink how we how we plant and how we keep it alive. Abby Cole, CBC News, St. John's.