Ben’s Pumpkins

“The Pumpking”—that’s what Ben Notterman’s parents call him. Because, after all, here he is on their lawn at dawn, the blue-eyed, freckle-faced, bearded monarch, decked out in his vestments—sweatshirt, grubby jeans, and a crown, a ball cap smushed down on his sleep-tousled hair—as he dismounts his ATV to inspect his loyal subjects: 6,000 pumpkins, arranged in tidy rows, like a royal court packed with orange faces. Consider also that Ben, 34, has been the reigning squash king of East Hardwick, Vermont, on a lovely dirt road called (so appropriately) Pumpkin Lane, for more than a quarter-century, growing his business since the ripe old age of 6.

Admittedly, it was his dad’s idea. One day after Ben and his mom had returned home with a trunkload of store-bought pumpkins, Ben’s father asked, “How much did all this cost?” Upon learning the truth, he replied, “I think we’ll grow our own.” So the same year that Ben’s teacher taught him simple arithmetic in school, he also learned that if he planted a 50-cent packet of seeds, tended his seedlings into thriving plants, and then sold his harvest of 24 portly squashes for a dollar apiece from the front lawn, he’d make what we grownups call a great rate of return.

But Ben’s lessons in financial literacy weren’t always so gratifying. When he was 8, he and his father made a sales call. Ben’s dad waited in the truck as Ben hopped out with an armload of inventory; he returned minutes later with a soda in one hand and a candy bar in the other, a triumphant grin all over his face.

“How’d it go?” Ben’s father asked.

“Oh, it went great.”

“Well, if you add up the cost of those pumpkins and compare it with the cost of what they gave you … Think about that.”

Ben did the math. “Whoa!” he blanched.

By fourth grade, Ben was discovering how to keep calm and carry on in customer satisfaction. In the weeks leading up to Halloween, Ben (dressed as Zorro) had seen many of his classmates sob whenever they dragged their parents over to buy the biggest (hence most prohibitively expensive) specimens. So Ben began arranging his product in clumps: the $2 pumpkins here, the $12 pumpkins there. But the clumps lacked majesty, and so, since fifth grade, he’s gone linear, organizing them into nice, even price rows—rows that he shifts forward and mows around as the grass grows up around his steel tractor (John Deere), which he drives at unruly speeds, accomplishing everything in third gear, which is why his father also refers to The Pumpking as “Mr. Vroom-Vroom.”

By middle school, Ben had mastered the tractor and thereby expanded his enterprise from a patch to a field to several fields. Then, as he entered high school and hit his growth spurt, his business did, too. Raising almost 3,000 plants on nearly five acres, Ben’s production surged beyond his personal capability, so he began hiring additional labor to help transplant, weed, and reap the harvest. Now he was earning a king’s ransom; the orange paper-lined “honesty system” cash box, with its “Pay here, thanks,” was always brimming by day’s end.

Most of Ben’s profit went straight into a savings account, but some was spent on the kinds of things young men dream about. Whereas the pumpkin magically afforded Cinderella’s carriage to the ball, the proceeds of Ben’s pumpkins yielded his first snowmobile (royal blue) and then his first four-wheeler. Then, when he graduated from high school, his pumpkins funded much of college: courses like environmental science, forestry, and (of course) finance. However, while acquiring his higher education, Ben missed four sales seasons. In his absence, his mom and dad threatened to rename their front lawn “Wholesale: Ben’s Parents’ Pumpkins.” “But am I going to get royalties?” The Pumpking asked, incredulously.

Now a quarter-century after his business sprouted, Ben teaches forestry at the local tech center. He lives next door to his parents, surrounded by hayfields and cattle pasture, and his backroad business is still sovereign. What has changed, however, is that these days, Ben’s scepter is his omnipresent cell phone.

When I catch up with him this foggy morning, he’s scrolling though text messages while simultaneously rolling up the ghostly row cover that protects the pumpkins from increasingly chilly nights. Soon the lawn is revealed: a silent crowd of orange faces, 20 kinds, ranging in size from the fist-sized ‘Jack Be Little’ to the chunky ‘Howden’ and ‘Long Island Cheese’, right up to the hassock-sized monsters of ‘Dill’s Atlantic Giant’. There’s enough raw jack-o’-lantern material here to gratify every kid in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Ben pockets the phone as he stoops to inspect his squashes for soft spots. Aha … Upon finding a few, he clenches each one and, swiveling toward Hunger Mountain basking in the distance, pitches the punky orb across the road to a group of the family steers, black-and-white Holsteins who wait hopefully in their corral for treats. Soon there’s bright-orange pulp stuck on their dark muzzles as they leer back at him, The Pumpking’s jesters.

Ben’s Pumpkins. Snug Valley Farm, 824 Pumpkin Lane, East Hardwick, VT. 802-472-6185; benspumpkins.com/bens-pumpkins.

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