Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 22, 1995 TAG: 9510230006
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELISSA MILENKY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The outfit is more than a way to be festive, however. It's business.
Dulaney, along with her husband, Lee, and father, Dan Brann, run a 4-acre you-pick pumpkin patch in Christiansburg off Providence Boulevard near the Farmhouse Restaurant. Brann also has a wholesale pumpkin business with his partner, Paul Rodgers.
The two side businesses - all have full-time jobs - began with a few pumpkins in a backyard garden that has since grown to nearly 20 acres of carefully cultivated gourds.
"Before, we just kind of messed with it," said Brann, a Virginia Tech professor in the crop and soil environmental science department. "Now they're [Dulaneys] getting serious about marketing and selling our pumpkins."
Brann, who grew up on a farm in eastern Virginia, planted his first pumpkins in back of the family's Blacksburg home when Dulaney, now 23, was 6 years old. The garden soon expanded into an acre of rented land and Brann started selling the excess pumpkins to local grocery stores.
The business did not expand much further until Dulaney, then 19 and a student at Radford University, set up a "pumpkins for sale" sign next to her father's single patch on Providence Boulevard, settled herself in her car and waited. Sure enough, people filed in to pick the perfect pumpkin and a you-pick business was born.
As she continued through college, Dulaney and Lee, her boyfriend at the time, continued to work at the family patch during crisp October weekends while Brann remained the caretaker of the pumpkins. Extras were slowly added to the business - a blue and white striped tent, educational tours of the patch for school children and $2.50 Polaroid pictures of the kids in a pose that inevitably involves pumpkins.
When Dulaney married Lee last year, her father made the business into a partnership.
"It became a family thing and it's a family thing for all the people that come," said Dulaney, a teacher with the Virginia Preschool Initiative.
Dulaney and her husband, a manager at McDonald's, are the ones who dedicate their Saturdays - and often their Sundays - to sitting by the orange-dotted pumpkin patch and watching the parade of children and parents who come through each weekend. Sometimes, Dulaney said, the children come in wearing big orange pumpkin costumes or ghost outfits.
"They love it," said Dulaney, who added families with young children are their biggest customers. "They run through and find 10 million they want and finally find the one they're going to get."
While Brann raises the pumpkins for the you-pick operation, he also raises 12 acres of wholesale pumpkins: 7 acres with Rodgers and 5 acres of his own. These pumpkins are sold to individual wholesalers in the Carolinas. Brann started this part of the business, which has involved different partners, four years ago.
Between the two operations, Brann and Rodgers spend most of their summer and fall nights and weekends carefully cultivating the pumpkins. The gourds are planted in May and are harvested from late September until early November.
But the pumpkin business is fickle, Brann said. Not only does each pumpkin have to be perfect, but the gourds become virtually useless after Oct. 31.
"It's all aesthetics," said Rodgers, who works for the American Sheep Industry Association.
Raising pumpkins is not cheap. Equipment, rent and chemicals puts the cost at about $500 an acre to raise the pumpkins. On a good year, they can make $800 per acre and reinvest some of the $300 in profits on next year's crop.
This season has not been a banner year for pumpkin growers because of the combination wet spring and hot, dry summer. Brann said his pumpkins have been smaller than usual this year.
Though he would not reveal exact profits, Brann said they are selling the wholesale pumpkins at between 10 cents and 20 cents per pound - this year's going rate. The retail price is a bit higher. The Dulaneys, for example, are selling their pumpkins for between $3 to $35 depending on the size and variety.
While the you-pick operation depends on locals getting an itch for a fresh pumpkin decoration, Brann always sells most of his pumpkins by May because the competition is fierce among small pumpkin growers. Virginia has 215 farms that plant 1,136 acres of pumpkins, according to the Virginia Cooperative Extension Service.
Brann added that Virginia growers also have to compete with farmers in Indiana, Ohio and other states.
"The only way you're going to break into the pumpkin business is if you're going to take the market from someone else," he said.
At this point, Brann and Rodgers do not think they will increase the size of their business because their full-time jobs take precedence. The Dulaneys also are happy with the size of their operation for now.
But all say they will continue the pumpkin businesses next year.
"We'll count our money in about a month and rub our sore muscles," Rodgers said. "Yeah, we'll do it again."
by CNB