In what is probably one of the most inventive creations this Halloween season, a local farmer in California is taking pumpkin growing to a whole other level with his "pumpkinstein" creations.
By growing pumpkins in a plastic mold, Cinagro-Farms (Cinagro is organic spelled backwards) owner Tony Dighera can shape his pumpkins to be the spitting image of the iconic movie monster Frankenstein. It also lets Dighera charge a premium for his monstrous pumpkin creations -- $75 a pumpkin.
The price isn't slowing down business. Dighera can't grow the pumpkins fast enough. He's harvested more than 5,500 of them this year and sold them all to suppliers months ago. Retailers will be selling the pumpkins for upwards of $100 in the weeks leading up to Halloween. While not every customer is going to be spending $100 for a pumpkin, Dighera says the pumpkins themselves become an event of sorts, with parents bringing their children into stores just to take a look at the "pumpkinsteins."
With the huge amount of success from selling the oddly shaped pumpkins, Dighera will be converting nearly his entire farm over to pumpkinstein production with the goal of harvesting 30,000 to 40,000 pumpkins in 2015. It took him four years and cost him more than $400,000 to nail down the perfect "pumpkinstein" formula by experimenting with 27 different varieties of pumpkins to find the perfect one for the Frankenstein mold. Dighera in the past sold uniquely shaped watermelons ranging from squares to hearts, but says pumpkins are much easier to grow and harvest because consumers don't buy pumpkins, especially "pumpkinsteins," for how they taste.
"I started playing around and realized pretty quickly this wasn't going to be a quick thing," Dighera told the New York Times. "But I also realized that if I could really figure it out, I would have something special."
Local media can't get enough of the "pumpkinsteins" either. The Cinagro-Farms Facebook page is filled with stories from local news stations reporting on "the amazing pumpkinsteins". Not all the attention is good, however. Dighera says on four separate occasions people have tried to sneak onto the farm and assumes they meant to steal his pumpkins or learn his method for how they are grown. Some larger farms have offered to buy Dighera out, but so far he is content running his own show.
Dighera says in his industry, everybody is trying to get noticed. With his "pumpkinsteins", Dighera has done just that.
