TEXAS NEIGHBORS | FALL 2020 By Jennifer Dorsett Field Editor The carefully-carved pumpkins that decorate homes this time of year may have started in a Texas pumpkin patch. A big portion of pumpkins for sale in Texas get their start in Floyd County, northeast of Lubbock on the Texas South Plains. And Floy-dada, the county seat, is known as Pumpkin Capital, USA. The story begins in the mid-20th Century with B.A. “Slim” Robert-son. Robertson was a longtime farm-er in the area who grew the first crop of pumpkins in the late 1950s, according to local lore. “Uncle Slim, as I called him, started my dad to raising pump-kins in the 1960s,” Tim Assiter, who grows pumpkins and operates As-siter Punkin Ranch, said. “He was really the first one to grow pump -kins here, and through trial and error, just figured some things out and shared that knowledge with other farmers.” And it grew from there. Throughout the years, more farmers started growing pump-kins. Assiter estimates by the mid-1990s, there were 30-45 growers in Floyd County growing about 3,000 acres of pumpkins each year. And while Assiter’s family had grown pumpkins on the side during that time, their operation didn’t re-ally take off until 1992. “My dad had been growing pumpkins all those years, but after my mom retired, she started taking some of the pumpkins that maybe weren’t as perfectly round as those they were sending to market and using them to line her driveway as decoration in the fall,” Assiter said. “Then, people started stopping by and saying ‘Hey, I’d like to buy a pumpkin.’ So, in 1993, I set up a little retail location at their house where we had different bins of pumpkins, and someone sat out there all the time to sell them.” Over the next five years, word spread quickly, and the Assiter Punkin Ranch was an official suc -cess. Then, in 2000, the Assiter family built a big red barn and now have visitors from all over the state and world stop by to experience fall on the pumpkin ranch. “We now offer a whole experi-ence,” Assiter said. “We have sheep, goats, mini horses and mini don-keys, a wonderful pumpkin mini train ride for the kids, cotton can-WWW.TEXASFARMBUREAU.ORG