Milaca farmer experimenting with pumpkins producing hulless seeds

MILACA — While her greenhouse is complete of them, a Milaca grower’s pumpkins will not meet up with a toothy-smiled stop on entrance porches this Oct.

Alternatively, their rotund, mottled inexperienced shells will be break up and Rachel Sannerud will scoop the seeds out of the yellow-orange flesh. These seeds are the conclude goal of a two-calendar year grant project: growing pumpkins for their hulless seeds, termed pepitas.

Sannerud has fully commited to growing kinds of these pumpkins as a specialty crop for two years following getting an approximately $11,000 Sustainable Agriculture Demonstration Grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. 

“It can be basically like a science experiment that you improve on farm,” Sannerud claimed.

Pepitas do not have the white, harder pith encompassing the pumpkin seed. They are a little bit lesser, and come out of the pumpkin green. The seeds are a health and fitness food items and can be promoted right to people through farmers markets and also wholesale to places like places to eat and bakeries, Sannerud said. 

The grant allows her to discover increasing hulless seed pumpkins with no some of the fiscal chance. It is a learning expertise, and the effects of the experiment — what kinds operate properly, finest procedures for escalating, pressure from sickness and pests, good harvesting and processing methods — are shared with other farmers in a challenge report.

Sannerud owns and operates Pluck Flower Farm, a smaller Milaca farm in which brilliant blooms from zinnias and celosia were however expanding Thursday in close proximity to the pumpkin patch she’s recognized for the experiment.

Hulless seed pumpkins have been developed in other international locations and other elements of the U.S., Sannerud reported, but have not truly been explored as a specialty crop in Minnesota.

“For me and a large amount of other smaller farmers, we want to know how it does here,” Sannerud explained.

Sannerud purchased the farm from a few nearby brothers who are living near the land she now cultivates. One particular passes alongside agricultural looking through material to her — including a John Deere journal with a feature article on hulless seed pumpkins. In the piece, Sannerud claimed, the seeds ended up getting utilized for their oil.

“What I took from it was that these are the exact same pumpkins that make the stylish seeds that go in people’s granola,” she said. “And I want to see if we can mature that.”

The increasing timeline also is effective properly for her farm the pumpkins require planting a minor later than most of her flowers, and harvest time arrives when her fresh flower get the job done is winding down for the year, giving her much more time to harvest and course of action them.

They’ve been entertaining to improve, Sannerud claimed, but she does not have the information and facts she wants nevertheless to decide no matter if she’ll plant these pumpkins earlier the two-calendar year grant stint. To make that final decision, she requires to discover some of the exact same items other farmers will want to know, far too: How much time it usually takes to course of action the seeds, and what the yield is like.