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GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
La Gina Metcalf, 96, started working at the pumpkin
park in 1985.
“My husband drove the train,” she said. “And I worked in
the little office selling pumpkins.”
These days, La Gina keeps track of the 200 seasonal
employees, and monitors the school tours provided for kids
from Pre-school through Third Grade. Monday through
Friday mornings during the pumpkin season, a thousand
kids per day make the rounds of the park.
“I get excited every year,” La Gina said. “I can’t wait for
October. I like to be busy. And I like people.”
The pumpkin, its seeds planted in the summer, its fruit
harvested in the fall and stored in a root cellar for eating
during the winter, has long been a symbol of the bounty of
the harvest season. Pumpkins originated in the Americas,
where seeds have been discovered that date back to 7,000
B.C.E. They were a staple of the indigenous peoples in the
Americas who ate the seeds, flesh, flowers, and rind. Today,
they’re grown on every continent but Antarctica.
If you want to, you can buy a pumpkin anywhere. But
you don’t go to the Uesugi Farms Pumpkin Park just to
buy pumpkins: You go to immerse yourself in a world that
doesn’t exist for most of us anymore. It’s a world of the
harvest, the farm, the country, and the county fair all rolled
into one.
Pumpkins are probably the primary goal for most
visitors. So when you enter the park, wheelbarrows are
available to hold all the pumpkins you’re going to choose
from among the thousands on display—a huge variety of
pumpkins are available, from the standard jack-o-lantern
to white, blue, red, mini, turban, Cinderella, and sugar
pumpkins for pie-making. Bales of straw and bundled corn
stalks are also available for purchase to create a holiday
display at home.
OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2018
gmhtoday.com
Pumpkin Park
Y
ou can be sure that autumn has arrived by the chilled
air, the fallen leaves, the shorter days, and the opening
on October 1st of the Uesugi Farms Pumpkin Park.
Coming from or going towards San Martin on Monterey Road,
your eye is drawn to the huge inflated pumpkin, the pumpkin
pyramid, which requires 4,000 pumpkins all by itself, and
the miniature train chugging alongside the road. You can’t
help but smile, thinking ahead to carving jack-o'-lanterns,
celebrating Halloween, and sitting at a table laden with food
and the warmth of a holiday meal with friends and family.
Uesugi Farms Pumpkin Park has long served South
County as the harbinger of Fall and the outlet for all things
pumpkin. In 1979, Joe Aiello and his partner Dennis
Humphreys purchased the original Uesugi Farms from
George Uesugi, keeping the name in George’s honor. The
pumpkin park started as a pumpkin patch in 1984 when
Aiello’s sons, Michael and Peter, then ten and seven y ears
of age, asked if they could sell pumpkins. Aiello planted an
acre of pumpkins across Monterey Road from the present-
day pumpkin park and let them have at it.
“I don’t think they even knew how to count back
change,” the senior Aiello said.
From that humble beginning, Uesugi Farms Pumpkin
Park started a thirty-three year tradition that has grown into
a 45-acre Park with over 15 attractions.
“We are a family farm,” Pumpkin Park Manager Crystal
Melton said. “And the park is an extension of that, so every-
thing we do is about families and fun.”
Seasonal employee, Shelley Traverso said, “After I retired,
I applied for a job at the park because I thought it would be
fun, and now I’ve been here every October for seven years.”
Traverso said that it’s all about the kids: “Every year parents
tell me ‘We’ve been bringing our kids since they were
babies, and they still love it.’”