When to Carve a Pumpkin in New Brunswick
New Brunswick’s growing season wraps up early enough that pumpkins are usually long off the vine before Halloween ever shows up on the calendar.
Home & garden, state by state
Everything we have worked out for New Brunswick: what to plant and when, which varieties finish in time, the pests that actually turn up here, and the jobs that pay off month by month. We also cover the rest of the property, from lawns and soil to home care and energy, because a garden rarely stops at the vegetable bed.
The numbers first, because everything else follows from them. Measured at the weather station in Moncton, the last spring freeze falls around May 23 and the first fall freeze falls around October 2, 1,594 growing degree days in the year.
That is enough for early varieties, tight for anything late. Garlic does well: 34.8 weeks below 40 °F, comfortably past the six it needs to form a proper head.
Elsewhere on the property in New Brunswick: the pests that turn up here.
Figures from Environment and Climate Change Canada. A state is not one climate: elevation, a large lake or the coast can move these dates by two weeks either way, so check your own county with the extension service before you spend money.
New Brunswick’s growing season wraps up early enough that pumpkins are usually long off the vine before Halloween ever shows up on the calendar.
Onions bulb by the clock, not the thermometer, and Moncton’s clock reads 15 hours and 34 minutes of daylight on the longest day of the year.
A practical look at which apple varieties survive New Brunswick winters, how to pair them for pollination, and when frost around Moncton threatens the bloom.
New Brunswick winters keep furnaces and wood stoves running hard for months at a time, and the coldest stretch drives the season’s average low down near…
New Brunswick’s cropland is mapped mostly as Podzol, an acid soil that forms under spruce and fir, running a median surface pH of about 4.7, with a…
New Brunswick gives you roughly four and a half months of frost-free growing, bookended by a cool spring and a firm autumn cutoff.
New Brunswick gardens see early-season maggots working cabbage and corn beds, foliage-eating beetles on lilies and potatoes by late spring, and fruit…
Late May through early June is when Colorado potato beetles start showing up in New Brunswick potato patches, right as the first plants push through the…
The lily leaf beetle (Lilioceris lilii) is active in New Brunswick from mid-April through late summer, with the heaviest plant damage happening in May…
Emerald ash borer showed up in New Brunswick in 2018, confirmed in the Edmundston area of Madawaska County, right along the Quebec border where the…