Firing pumpkins a kilometre and other lessons in Nova Scotia farming

“I’m not sure of the distance, but it’ll fire a pumpkin a kilometre anyway,” said Blake Jennings.

The largest pumpkin cannon in Canada is coming to Blake’s Pumpkin Jungle in Masstown.

Built by Salmon River welder Wayne Smith, it’s the length of a tractor trailer and uses compressed air to launch pumpkins skyward.

And it’s only one of the various contrivances for launching and smashing pumpkins (including a trebuchet) that will draw hundreds to the third annual Chantelle’s Cystic Fibrosis Pumpkin Blast.

The event is held in memory of Chantelle Lindsay, a family friend who died of the disease in 2020 – she was 23 years old.

Over its first two years, the event raised $75,000 for the Chantelle Lindsay Legacy Fund.

“This should be our biggest year yet,” said Jennings of the event running from 10 to 4 p.m. on Oct. 28 and 29th.

Started young

For Jennings, Chantelle’s Cystic Fibrosis Pumpkin Blast will also mark the welcome wind-down from another long season.

A sizeable portion of the pumpkins we see all around us this time of year are grown by the 29-year-old – owner of one of the two largest pumpkin farms in Atlantic Canada.

At eight years old, the son of a poultry farmer wanted his own spending money.

“My father showed me some ground, said I could use that,” recalled Jennings.

He planted a few acres of pumpkins.

The next year, he grew 3,000 pumpkins and rented a strawberry hut from up the road to sell them roadside.

Year over year, he kept taking over more ground from his family’s Bayview Poultry Farms.

This year, he grew 75 acres, averaging 1,800 pumpkins an acre.

Jennings’s age makes him a rarity in an industry struggling with generational succession.

The average age of a farmer in Nova Scotia is 58.2 years (the national average is 56).

And farmers are getting older as fewer want the long hours, uncertainty and stress.

Busy time

While he helps run the poultry farm year-round and plants and tends his crop through the spring and summer, pumpkin season gets busy in early September with the beginning of harvest.

By 5:30 each morning, Jennings is tending to the chickens, fixing equipment for their egg farm.

Two hours later, it’s time to switch to pumpkins – walking the fields to decide what to harvest for the day’s orders and getting the bins ready for the six temporary foreign workers who pick them.

The latter work from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m.

Then come the handful of students who pick with him through the evenings until dark.

When they’ve gone home, he loads the trucks that come to collect the crop.

‘Always knew I’d be a farmer’

Asked about what drives him, Jenning was blunt.

“There’s not a moment in life I ever thought I’d do anything else,” he said.

“I wanted to be an engineer, a mechanic and a carpenter but I also always knew I’d be a farmer. You’ve kind of got to be a bit of everything to be a farmer anyway.”

As the fifth generation of his family toiling on this piece of earth overlooking the Bay of Fundy’s upper reaches, he had the “privilege” of learning the way of life from his grandfather, Cecil, and father, Glenn.

The showmanship and love of equipment has been his own touch.

When at 17 years old he wanted a truck, he built a 1973 Chevy one-ton from the axles-up.

A series of homebuilt Chevy squarebodies for mudding and towing and even one three-metre tall, pumpkin-pile-jumping monster truck (a 1976 Chevy Crew-cab dually) followed.

A few of his mechanical passion projects have decorations of Blake’s Pumpkin Jungle.

They’ve taken a back seat lately to the family he and his wife, Rebecca, are growing.

There’s a sixth generation on the farm – her name is Addilyn.

She’s two.

“She gets awful mad if I go through the driveway in the tractor without picking her up to take her to the field,” said Jennings.

Admittance to Chantelle’s Cystic Fibrosis Pumpkin Blast is by donation. There’ll also be live music, a bouncy castle, pumpkin carving contest, wagon rides, mechanical bull and pie eating contest.

There’s also four quite-pettable goats named Clyde, Wilbur, Lily and Lacy.