Moms and dads with their own versions of Linus van Pelt at home may be bracing for a scarier Halloween than ever before, thanks to a girl named Irene.
Make that Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene.
The ferocious weather pattern that ravaged the Northeast late last month could make picking the perfect pumpkin nearly impossible for hundreds of thousands of families living along the East Coast.
A large number of farmers in New York and Massachusetts reported total losses of their crops, including a few growers, who told ABC News that roughly 15,000 to 20,000 pumpkins, washed away during Irene.
According to news reports, Irene’s torrential rainfall caused rivers to overflow and flooded thousands of acres of pumpkin patches up and down the Eastern seaboard.
“I think there’s going to be an extreme shortage of pumpkins this year,” Darcy Pray, owner of New York’s Pray’s Family Farms told USA Today. “I’ve tried buying from people down in the Pennsylvania area, I’ve tried locally here and I’ve tried reaching across the border to some farmers over in the Quebec area. There’s just none around.”
So what does the pumpkin shortage mean for parents who are looking to carve jack-o-lanterns with their kids in the weeks leading up to Halloween?
Be prepared to dig deep and potentially put up your dukes.
Experts say you will likely have to pay twice as much this year for your Halloween pumpkin. What’s more, some farmers say they are expecting things to get ugly in places where the gourd-like squash are in really short supply.
Great. That’s all the world needs now, a bunch of crazed parents treating limited supply pumpkins as though they were Zhu Zhu Pets at the height of the Christmas 2009 shopping season.
The Washington Post interviewed a farmer, who suggested that buyers purchase pumpkins as soon as possible, because waiting could mean doing without this Halloween. The grower also included a tip on getting the pumpkins you buy in September to last until the last day in October. The trick: Wash the orange fruit with water mixed with a little bleach. Doing so is supposed to kill any fungus left over from the fields and helps stave off mold and rotting.
Otherwise, I would suggest heading to Target. I saw a bunch of papier-mâché pumpkins ripe for the picking.
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