Are British Pumpkins Under Threat?

Carved jack-o’-lanterns have long been the poster for Halloween, but pumpkins may be harder to get your hands on this year – and it’s all down to climate change. As a result of increasingly unpredictable weather and heavy rain, British farmers have faced difficult harvests this year, which has led to an unusually low crop of the autumnal squash.

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According to National Trust gardeners, recent weather conditions have been ‘abysmal’, meaning many plants within its gardens stopped growing and needed harvesting early. Other properties, meanwhile, saw their pumpkins destroyed by slugs. 

One of the worst affected was Duham Massey in Altrincham: farmer Jonathan Hewitt says this is the worst season his 10-acre pumpkin patch has seen ‘in all his years’, with almost all this year’s crops failing. ‘We were hoping for 40,000, but we’ve seen about a 90 percent failure rate,’ he told the BBC. ‘It’s off the scale harsh.’ 

At Kingston Lacy in Dorset, meanwhile, only half the estate’s crop was saved. The venue’s head gardener Andrew Hunt explained how pumpkins need a long, hot growing season to thrive, but this year’s cold, prolonged spring meant germination took place later than usual. 

And at Nostell in Crofton, West Yorkshire, just 25 pumpkins have been harvested this autumn, in comparison to the usual average of 80. Paul Dibb, the property’s garden and outdoors manager, said: ‘The wet spring and early summer has resulted in an army of slugs attacking the young plants we grew and planted out.’

This is in line with trends across the board. Recent analysis from climate experts suggests England has faced its second worst harvest on record, following heavy rain last winter – which continued into spring and early summer. Figures from Defra show the country’s wheat harvest was down 22 percent on 2023, while the winter oilseed rape harvest was down 32 percent. 

Tom Lancaster, a land, food and farming analyst at the ECIU, said: ‘This year’s harvest was a shocker, and climate change is to blame. While shoppers have been partly insulated by imports picking up some of the slack, Britain’s farmers have borne the brunt of the second worst harvest on record.

‘It is clear that climate change is the biggest threat to UK food security. And these impacts are only going to get worse until we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.’