Fall is here, which means it’s time to pick out your pumpkin for the season.

It’s pumpkin season, if you hadn’t already noticed. Hard not to with pumpkin spice everything filling up store shelves and populating coffee drink menus.

I, Pam Marino, am not a big pumpkin spice fan but I do love pumpkins. I get happy when piles of bright orange pumpkins and other autumnal gourds in a wide range of colors begin appearing at grocery stores. They conjure up fun memories of visits to pumpkin patches both as a child and a parent, of watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown year after year and, of course, carving jack-o-lanterns for Halloween.

Which is why I was really happy to read this week’s 831 feature, “Gourd Times,” written by Associate Editor Erik Chalhoub, all about Borchard Farms’ annual pumpkin patch. It made me want to get there as soon as possible and check it out.

Pumpkin king Tom Borchard estimates they stocked approximately 100,000 pumpkins representing 25 different varieties for this season, nearly all grown on his family’s Salinas farm. 

He got hooked on giant pumpkins by chance, after he tried out some seeds by planting them on a hill and didn’t do much to encourage them. One plant produced a 150-pound pumpkin. It turned him into a self-described “pumpkin nut.”

If you like pumpkins as much as I do, I encourage you to read the full story about how the Bourchard pumpkin patch came to be. Maybe I’ll see you out there as I pick out a pumpkin to bring home.