SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) – One minute you want to wear shorts and another, like today, the winter coat is required. There has been a great deal of fluctuation with the weather lately and the beginning of this week has brought a few days of cold. Pumpkin Hollow and other businesses are reliant on the weather to keep their merchandise in peak shape as well as to encourage customers to come. Pumpkins themselves are sensitive and Pumpkin Hollow Employee Cooper Weinman said that when it gets too cold they require extra care, like tarping over them, to prevent the damage from the elements.
“It’s just when the, it kind of gets exposed to too harsh of a temperature the shells can’t like withstand it and it’ll actually freeze inside and it kind of breaks down the pumpkin itself,” Weinman said.
The cold currently impacting the area, as well as the warm expected to return in a few days, have a naturally occurring explanation. In the fall a wavy weather pattern is created across the country but the impact of the pattern is felt more from time to time given the location of Central New York in relation to where the warm and cold winds come from. With a change of seasons the warm weather of the summer is being pushed out by the cold weather, but not without a fight. Meteorologist Mark Pellerito said that, as a result, there is this back and forth where a few days will be above average and a few days will be below average depending which wind is winning out.
“And so, you have longer periods of time to cool off at night and yet, you know, you still have some warm temperatures out there that can be brought up from the south and that is what has been occurring a lot lately,” said Pellerito.
Some of this also comes back to the plants themselves. When winter approaches the cycle of certain plants end and so when they die or go dormant they stop putting moisture back into the air. On top of the longer nights that follow the Autumnal Equinox, the dryness that comes from this enhances what we have been experiencing.
For businesses that up and down is hard to predict and becomes increasingly impacted on them as winter come closure. The cold is very detrimental to encouraging people to come and to keeping the pumpkins in top shape. The stretches of warm weather become all the more beneficial though.
“Everything here is really weather dependent, and we were blessed to have a couple good weekends during the October, December area,” said Weinman. “Its super busy, a lot of sales, a lot of pumpkins. And the pumpkin picking is a lot easier. Days like today, it’s going to be a cold one.”
According to the National Weather Service, following the next two days of the cold front a return to that warm is in order. Expect more than a week, possibly even two weeks of that fifty to sixty degree weather that we all love about fall.
