James Maxey, 19, started growing pumpkins when he was just 13 years old.
He did it as a hobby… as people do. Who needs a Nintendo when you can grow a gourd?
Now, the pumpkin farm he helped create – owned by his parents, Keith and Katherine – is the UK’s largest.
James employs 35 staff to run Maxey’s Farn, which is open from 9 to 5 seven days a week in the run-up to Halloween.
Customers can pick-up as many pumpkins as they like and pay depending on the size of the fruit, with prices ranging from £2 for smaller ones to £10 for the largest.
As strange as it may sound for a 13-year-old to start growing pumpkins on a whim and then end up with a successful business, it gets stranger.
James doesn’t even like pumpkin.
He said: ‘I roasted one last year because I thought I should at least try eating one but I wasn’t keen.’
Fascinating.
Each year James and his family have to grow more pumpkins to keep up with demand, as in previous years the farm has been so popular they’ve run out before Halloween.
When James started out he only grew enough pumpkins to sell to his friends for some extra pocket money.
Seven years later, he now harvests 25,000 pumpkins each autumn.
This time they’ve grown a massive stash so everyone can carve their jack o’ lanterns.
The process begins in the spring, when James buys thousands of pumpkin seeds from a supplier in Lincolnshire, which he then plants in the fields with a converted planter attached to a tractor.
The business has been so successful that James left school at 16.
‘I started when I was 13 next to the farm shop with a little half-an-acre field with about 200 pumpkins in it which I sold to my school friends,’ says James.
‘Every year I planted more and more and now I’ve about five or six acres.
‘Any pumpkins which are left over get chopped up and ploughed back into the soil so nothing is wasted.
‘The soil around this area has quite a lot of clay in it which I think helps our pumpkins maintain their deep dark orange colour.
‘In supermarkets pumpkins tend to be quite light and almost yellow but ours have a nice dark colour to them which people like.
‘I have always wanted to be out and could never sit in a classroom or anything.
‘I have always got to be out doing something.’
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/16/pumpkin-farm-teenager-started-growing-thirteen-now-uks-largest-10930459/
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