Environmentalists lament about farmland, vineyards, and other fields being taken up by development called "progress". Detroit Metro Airport is no different. Though much of the land to the immediate north & south is vacant, plans are being made to further develop these plots and add to the sewer & utility woes some neighborhoods experience.
There's still some room for farming, allbeit limited. This small area includes a pumpkin patch which is alongside the airport's main route about fifteen blocks up.
It makes me somewhat amazed that as busy & as polluted as the general area is, that there's still soil in existence that's somewhat fertile. But for all the landowner's efforts in planting the pumpkin seeds (not to mention keeping the area from builders), are the efforts worth it?
They had their annual pumpkin pick & sale from around October 15th to the first of this month. I drove by the area on approximately seven occasions, and only twice did I even see any customers hunting around the area. Then today, driving home from work, I saw a pile of almost 100 pumpkins dumped in a corner of the lot: many smashed, others deformed & perhaps diseased.
Simply put, if they will not be used to make fresh pumpkin pie, then what is the point of planting them when half of them don't end up selling?
Or put it this way: Why sell them for carving at all?
I never got into the carving, much as I didn't get into the treats. At a young age, when I saw the pumpkin guts, my stomach turned. How could that "slop" turn out to be pie? And what do we do with the jack-o-lantern we can no longer have because it begins to sag?
Buying plastic props would be cheap and untraditional, but would certainly save some bucks for the consumer by using a reusable resource - not to mention the many pumpkins that could be saved & utilized the best way: the aforementioned pies.
See it as you will. It's likely if you took my word for it, you'd swear Halloween would join the long list of "Hallmark" or "Peanuts" holidays. Just don't tell Linus!
