Transcript for The “missing” Great Pumpkin

Dear Great Pumpkin, I’m looking forward to your arrival on Halloween night. I hope you will bring me lots of presents.

Well Linus, I’m pretty sure the Great Pumpkin will still show up on Halloween but it is true the pumpkin and other fruit harvests have definitely been smaller this year.

Oh Good Grief

Thanksgiving is a busy day at Charlotte’s Family Orchard in Gagetown. Many families are out in the brisk sunny day to pick apples and choose their pumpkins. Two year old Cayden and four year old Marcus were among them.

Are you guys here to get pumpkins? You want to talk into the mic?

What are you here for Marcus? What we gonna get?

A punkin

And what else

And apples

What are you looking for today?

Pumpkin

What are you going to do with your pumpkin?

Appies

And appies? What are you going to do with your pumpkin?

Say we’re going to make happy faces.

This year’s harvest has produced smaller pumpkins in fewer numbers. Squash and some varieties of apples were also affected. The blame is falling on the bees, but it really should be on the falling rain drops. According to farmer Wilf Hiscock and bee keepers Don and Marlene Price, the cold wet weather kept the bees inside their hives during the critical flowering time.

If it’s wet they won’t go out because they won’t fly in the rain, raindrops are pretty much as big as they are so they’ll stay inside for that.

Hiscock owns Charlotte’s Family Orchard in Gagetown. He’s a busy man today leading apple picking parties from the fruit stand to the orchard.

So what are you taking up there, your truck?

You want to jump in?

Yes please.

I gotta move that tractor

As we drove to the orchard Hiscock told me about the birds and the bees, well mainly just the bees.

But during the week, the time, when the Cortlands in particular were in blossom, in bloom, blossom, the weather was terrible, it was cold miserable, wet weather and bees will not leave the hives if the weather is miserable. And as I said before we don’t have enough rain jackets or umbrellas for all the bees. So what happened, they got out, they didn’t get out and do their job.

Don and Marlene Price know all too well what the bees are doing, they own eleven hives. Although today is sunny, the cold has the bees staying snug inside. Only a few would give comment. Even with thirty thousand bees handy to their garden some of their own crops did poorly because of the rain at blossom time.

All the chickens come to the fence because Marlene feeds them every time she’s down here.

Right

Every time I’m down here I pick something and throw in for them so. There’s our one pumpkin that we got and you can see how close our bees are.

Oh no, so one, how many plants did you have?

Oh probably six or seven plants, not too many, because it’s just for the two of us, but we got the one pumpkin and some birds picked the back of it open, so not so good.

Hiscock says pumpkin, squash and other low lying plants rely on the bees even more than some other crops.

And the pumpkin pops, uh crops is more susceptible to having good bee, ah a lot of bees around because they’re low on the ground and the wind don’t spread the pollen as well as it does in the trees where there’s, where the Cortlands or the apples are.

Out at the orchard apple pickers skirt the muddy trail to get to the various trees for their favourites. Cortlands, Red Delicious, Honeycrisp and Macintosh. It’s more than just choosing the perfect apples or pumpkin, it’s about the adventure, one that wouldn’t be possible at all without the bees.

As the pumpkin pie of Thanksgiving gives way to the jack-o-lantern of Halloween, the important but seldom appreciated bees are settling down for the winter. Hopefully Mother Nature will be kind to all of us for a more bountiful harvest next year.

For STU Journalism, I’m Tammy Murray in Gagetown.

Short URL: http://www.newbrunswickbeacon.ca/?p=1743

Posted by Tammy Murray on Oct 17, 2009. Filed under Transcripts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.