Knowing Your Neighbors: DC’s Best Produce Pumpkin Stands

DULUTH, Minn. – “Do you know how you fix a broken pumpkin? With a pumpkin patch,” DC’s Best Produce Seller, Jack Pearadin jokes.

DC’s Best Produce has been around for nearly 30 years, and currently hosts 30 acres of pumpkins and five acres of squash. This space is consumed with over 30 variations of pumpkins, which can now be found at stands across the Northland.

“We have our common jack-o-lantern pumpkin that’s like this, could be various sizes. We have our goosebump pumpkin here, we have our ghost pumpkins that also can be various sizes. Here we actually have two different pumpkins’ you can eat. This is your common pie pumpkin here and then we also have our Cinderella pumpkin right here. This comes in all sorts of various colors: red, blue, sometimes mix,” Pearadin explained.

Jack Pearadin says the Cinderella pumpkin has a sweeter taste compared to the common pie pumpkin. Also in the mix are Wolf Stem and Long John pumpkins.

The produce stands also offer ten variations of squash, including the delicata which is the most popular and the only one that you can eat it with the skin on.

“We’ve got delicata, spaghetti, acorn, kabocha, which also looks very similar to a buttercup, but buttercups’ have these blue bulbs here. Then we have our common butternut, our sunspots, which is also a variety of a kabocha, and then we have our koginuts’,” Pearadin said. “Now, what a lot of people don’t know about a lot of the squashes we have here, they’re actually pretty low in carbs. The majority of them, except for your butternut which about seventeen grams of carbs in it, per cup, all the other ones’ have about ten grams of carbs per cup.”

Jack met the farmer of DC’s Best Produce down in Arkansas one winter while indulging in another occupation, mining for diamonds and quartz crystals. And just like mining for diamonds, Jack relates the process of picking out pumpkins to a treasure hunt.

“It’s like a treasure hunt in itself. And it’s kind of like finding a box of assorted chocolates out in the pumpkin field, you just never know whatchya going to get,” Pearadin references Forrest Gump. “We have red pumpkins, we’ve got yellow pumpkins, we’ve got blue pumpkins, we even got orange pumpkins. That’s about it as far as color go.”

Other than gourds, the stand also sells bundles of cornstalks.

“It brings everyone together, young and old, and it’s a great family past time to carve them, decorate them, some people use chalk markers instead of carving them,” Pearadin said. “Just getting to see them smile and helping them, it’s making their world magical.”

The stand on Central Entrance Road is open daily from 9 in the morning till nightfall until Halloween.