Pumpkin PURVEYORS

When the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden needs 90,000 pumpkins pronto, who you gonna call? The Pumpkin Pyle of Floydada, north of Lubbock.

The family farm has been supplying the Arboretum for eight years. This three-generation enterprise started growing pumpkins in 1991, when Louis Pyle gave his 16-year-old grandson Jason 10 acres of land. “Paw-Paw” asked him what he wanted to grow, and Jason said pumpkins. That year the teen, parents Paula and Robert Pyle, and grandfather Louis raised 10 acres of pumpkins each. They started selling them off the road in front of their home.

Now the family has 660 acres, employs about 150 workers and loads between 15 to 20 semi-trucks a day during the season. The family mainly sells pumpkins in Texas and Oklahoma, but they also send trucks to Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

“It’s been a really good supplement to our farming,” Paula says. The family’s main crop is cotton.

Paula and daughter-in-law Lindsey take orders and run the office. The most popular pumpkins, she says, are the Jack-o-Lantern, the minis and the pie pumpkins. After that they receive the most orders for the Crystal Star, a large white pumpkin, the Fairytale, which is green and turns buckskin, and the Cinderella.

Her favorite pie? Pumpkin, of course. She says the best pumpkin to cook with is the Cheddar variety. Unusued pumpkins are good for fertilizer and cows.

Their website is done by the Pyles’ son-in-law, a software engineer. “We try to keep it in the family,” Paula says. “I pay him in babysitting.”

Our Neighborhood

By PATTI VINSON

Peace garden

Woodrow art teachers are planting hope, happiness and produce in an unused campus corner

Woodrow Wilson High School art teachers Miranda Korschun and Jessica Martinez have a vision for a peaceful garden. They are transforming an underused, dumping ground of a space on the campus into “The Art/Peace Garden” that will feed body and soul. And they are counting on East Dallas neighbors to make it happen.

One day as they walked the campus in search of areas to display students’ art, they discovered an unused courtyard just across the hall from one of their classrooms. “It was full of abandoned furniture, big bags of potting soil and piles of lumber,” Korschun says. “I proposed we create a peace garden there.”

Where most would see an industrial space bordered by a giant A/C unit and three tall, weathered-brick walls, these teachers saw potential. Korschun dreams of tall-backed benches to block the lessthan-serene view. Martinez points to a sunny corner as the ideal location for rows of potatoes and cages of tomatoes. Both imagine flowers, vegetables, tables and chairs. Produce will be donated to the Peace Pantry, housed at Woodrow and available to students and their families.

Both expect students to be involved in designing, creating, and maintaining the garden. “We’d like a space where students can work peacefully and safely, outside in the sunshine,” Korschun says. “The garden will give them a beautiful space to create and reflect, while instilling a sense of ownership and responsibility for working to raise produce and other plants.”

Th e space is primarily a project for members of the Art/Poetry/Gardening Club. At weekly meetings, members have the option of working on art, poetry or in the garden, as the club name suggests.

Wood row junior Rolando Bolanos is eager to dig in the dirt. “Ha ving a garden club will be great,” he says. “I have my own garden at home so I’m extremely passionate about gardening. The idea of having one at school and tending a garden with fellow classmates sounds great to me.” He says he is eager to hone his gardening skills, but he can foresee an added benefit to tending plants. “Teaching patience,” he says, “which my generation seems to lack.”

Other departments at Woodrow are lending a hand. Eng ineering students might apply their skills at designing raised garden beds and movable shelving.

Korschun and Martinez hope East Dallas neighbors will donate outdoor furniture, pots, containers, gardening tools and more. Equally important is help from experienced gardeners.

While the vegetable garden’s harvest will feed the body, the space is also intended to nourish the soul. Cl ub members may find inspira tion for paintings, drawings and poems. But the

HOW TO HELP: Donations needed

Outdoor furniture, pots and containers, rainwater collection container, watering cans, water hose with nozzle for watering at different intensities, trellises for climbing plants, tomato cages, 10 to 20 pairs of gardening gloves (multiple sizes), gardening tools including shovels, hand shovels, trowels, dowel rods, bamboo rods, drill, saw, staple gun and nail gun, plants in containers, yoga mats, compost bin, lumber, outdoor sculptures, bluetooth/wireless system for music

More information: mkorschun@dallasisd.org art teachers hope the space will become a popular mini-field trip for teachers of all subjects. “A quiet, serene space would give easily distracted students a better chance to learn to focus,” Martinez says.

Martinez has a personal interest in providing such a space. “As someone who was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder in high school, I understand how vital quiet spaces are,” she says. She sites statistics