Pumpkin Center: Jim Whiteside

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Welcome to the Home, Sweet Home Smell of Grandma's Cooking and Pumpkin Pie!

Tired of the ghoulish orange pumpkins sold in grocery stores! Tired of their small size and bland taste! Tired of their going bad before Halloween even gets here! Then come home to Pumpkin Center and rediscover pumpkins the way grandpa grew them—large, fleshy, hardy, and delicious!

We've been producing awarding-winning pumpkins and nothing, but pumpkins for over 60 years. Wanna try the real thing? Then stop by and see us sometime. The annual harvest starts Labor Day. That's the best time to pick up one of the last, old-fashioned, gourmet pumpkins around—a moonlight-tinged, broomstick-haunted, Ichebod-Crane sort of affair...in other words, a Pumpkin-Center pumpkin!

We're located on Highway 74 thirty miles east of Asheville, N.C. and 3.2 miles east of Lake Lure. Look for the Pumpkin Center sign. You can't miss it. That's because of the big, white farmhouse at the curve in the road there. In the fall of the year, it'll be full—and I do mean full—of gourmet pumpkins!

Hope to see you soon!

From Heirloom Seeds to Gourmet Pumpkins...in One Season!

It starts in the late spring when it's warm enough in the mountains for the tender leaves of the young pumps to survive. The precious seeds have been stored indoors all winter. They're the descendants of the original, heirloom pumpkins the family has been growing since the turn of the century—the twentieth century, that is!

Keeping the life-choking weeds out of the pumpkin patch is a never ending task. That's Zack Whiteside behind the wheel. It was his idea to convert the farm into a single-crop pumpkin producer. After returning from the second world war, he graduated in agriculture from NC State and was anxious to apply his newly minted skills to the family farm. It was a stroke of genius!

Like now, the mature pumpkins are harvested in the fall of the year and sold in the front yard of the nearby farmhouse. Like a faithful sentinel, the original, plank-covered log cabin has been standing guard over the alluvial fields since the early 1800's. From the 1840's on, it's been owned by a single family—the Whitesides. It's such a monument to our early history, it even has a name now–"The Pumpkin!"

Zack was the youngest of seven children. He's the second from the right. His father, called "Jim Wash" by those who loved him, was not only a farmer, but a county commissioner for many years. That was him standing among the rows of vintage pumpkins in the earlier picture.

It's his grandson, Z.T., who runs the farm now. As you might expect, he's quite athletic. He was a touring professional on the U.S ski circuit before finally accepting the inevitable and returning to the Kingdom of Pumpkins to accept the crown as its sovereign ruler.

His grandfather–the former monarch–would have been proud!