Plant a Pumpkin at the Cattaraugus County Fair with Cornell Cooperative Extension
Fairgoers can plant a pumpkin, learn about composting and sustainable agriculture, and discover how the Pumpkin Smash program helps reduce food waste while supporting local community gardens.
LITTLE VALLEY - If you’re looking for something different to do at this year’s Cattaraugus County Fair, then head over to the Corporate Building and visit the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Cattaraugus County booth. There will be tons of information and activities for all ages.
One of those activities will be planting pumpkins with our Nutrition and Food System Educator, Sheldon Kenyon. Participants will have the opportunity to plant a pumpkin that they will take home. They will also receive instructions on how to care for their pumpkin plant. This is a great way to learn about agriculture and how plants grow.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. If successful, pumpkin growers will be able to grow their own Halloween jack-o-lantern. After Halloween, these scary orange gourds can then be taken to a Pumpkin Smash site where you get to smash your jack-o-lantern and have it added to a compost pile, which will then be used in a community or school garden. Not only do you get to have fun smashing your jack-o-lantern and help a community or school garden, but you will also be reducing the number of pumpkins that go to landfills every year, where 1.3 billion pounds of discarded pumpkins create methane gas.
Last year, two sites (Salamanca City Schools and Canticle Farm in Allegany, NY) smashed over 100 pumpkins, creating over 1,000 pounds of smashed pumpkins for compost to be used in Salamanca’s school garden and Canticle Farm’s community garden. Salamanca’s site had a National Grid bucket truck, and a worker would take pumpkins 40-60 feet in the air to drop them. There was a grand finale where 100 pounds of pumpkins were dropped, one after another. We are hoping to have bucket trucks at both sites this year.
So if you’re hot at the fair and need to get out of the heat, come to the Corporate Building and stop in to see Sheldon. Plant a pumpkin, learn how to care for it, get some information on composting, and see what else Cornell Cooperative Extension of Cattaraugus County has to offer. If you are interested in hosting a Pumpkin Smash site this year in your community, you can learn about that too. See you at the fair.