PICKERINGTON, Ohio — Have you ever noticed how people are so particular when it comes to picking pumpkins? The same could be said for picking friends.
“Yeah, I think they do,” Terry Dunlap said. “I think they do.”
Dunlap is the guru of the gourds.
It’s a year-round effort, he says, which starts in November. Then, you have to order your products by January and plant them by May.
“And then it’s fight the weeds and fight the bugs and fight the blights and fight the mildew and hopefully we have a good crop,” he said.
Dunlap’s been farming the better part of 20 years. Sam’s Pumpkin Patch, though, was never his. Not originally.
“Sam Patterson was my really good friend,” Dunlap said.
Patterson sold pumpkins out of his front yard for 30 years. Dunlap is a long-time friend. When Patterson’s wife passed away, Dunlap says Patterson thought about giving it all up.
Instead, they made a deal; Dunlap would grow the pumpkins and Patterson would sell them.
So, that’s what they did.
Patterson was a fan favorite with pumpkin pickers.
“[He was] very enthusiastic about what he did, for sure,” Michelle Van Dyke said. “He loved kids. He loved pumpkins, yeah,” she laughed. "He loved pumpkins a whole lot.”
In 2018, Sam Patterson passed away. Before he passed Dunlap made him a promise.
“We had a handshake deal [and] he asked me to continue [and] I said yes,” Dunlap said. “When your best friend asks you a question to do something, you do it.”
“Yeah, it’s been really hard to come back,” Codey Larsen said.
It’s the second time in three years that Larsen has been to the pumpkin patch. For him, Patterson was more than a farmer or a pumpkin salesman.
He was family.
“I just think those are the good ol days,” he said of an old picture of him and Patterson. “Me in diapers enjoying life with my grandpa.”
But grandpa is still here. Larsen knows that. He sees him in every family and every pumpkin.
“I think he’d be as proud as ever just [having] people out here enjoying their day, spending it with him,” Larsen said.
Dunlap knows that, too.
“I feel him all the time,” he said. “And sometimes I step back when I get it filled up and say ‘How you like that, Sam’?”
It is a particular process; finding that perfect one.
The same could be said for a pumpkin.
“You just gotta be careful who you pick,” Dunlap said. “Yeah, just like a pumpkin.”
Sam’s Pumpkin Patch is open from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and is located at 455 Hill Road South in Pickerington.