You’d think it would take intense concentration to carve a 300-pound pumpkin with a Buck knife in front of a crowd keenly judging your speed and skill.
But when you’ve been doing it for nearly four decades, as Farmer Mike has, it comes pretty easy. Heck, you might even have time for some light-hearted fun.
“I’ll look into the crowd, and I’ll see somebody,” says Farmer Mike, nickname of San Jose’s Mike Valladao. “It’s funny because I’m staring at them, and it’s like, ‘I’m not hitting on you. I just like your eyebrows. I want to get your cheeks into a pumpkin.’ So sometimes people in the audience do end up on my pumpkins — or at least pieces of them do.”
Bystanders don’t usually notice they’re the model, but their spouses often do. “Normally it’s like, ‘Oh my god, that looks like you, dear!’” Valladao says, laughing.
After learning wood carving from a carousel horse craftswoman he met on San Francisco’s Pier 39, Valladao knifed his first public pumpkin at the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival in 1986. Since then, he’s become a yearly fixture at the Bay Area festival — which this year runs Oct. 18-19 – flourishing his blade on an elevated stage, transforming lumpy gourds into Louvre-worthy art.
Creativity is definitely in abundance at the 53-year-old pumpkin festival, which seems to hold something for everyone.
A running favorite is the Great Pumpkin Parade on Saturday, featuring revelers in homemade costumes dragging the year’s winner from the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off. (The world record to beat is 2,749 pounds, set in 2023 at the festival by Minnesota’s Travis Gienger.) There are four stages of music and performances, costume and pie-eating contests, a half-marathon and a 10K, and a smorgasbord of orangish food and beverages.
“It’s all done by local nonprofits and almost all of them incorporate pumpkin in what they’re serving,” says Ronan Fowler, whose Megalith events company is producing the festival. “There’s everything from pumpkin mac-n-cheese to pumpkin smoothies to pumpkin nachos and pumpkin cotton candy. Some of them you’re not sure if they’ll work, but it’s funny because they’ve figured out these recipes and they’re amazing.”
In this coastal town of under 12,000 residents, come October it seems that almost everyone has an artistic side. That’s on display at the festival’s sprawling arts market, featuring roughly 275 vendors offering everything from home decor to jewelry to craftwork.
“You’re not going to find tchotchkes and prepackaged foods,” Fowler says. “This is the real deal from the artist community, from high-end stonework to fine paintings.”
Ingrid and Ken Hanson started selling their glass-blown handiwork at the festival in 2008 because it “was highly recommended to us by other artists that we knew at the time,” says Ingrid Hanson. They make vases, paperweights, tumblers, lamps and sculptures — and of course pumpkins, because that’s a given here.
“We try to come up with a new floral-pumpkin design every year,” she says. “Our customers love our floral millefiori and twisted-cane glass pumpkins because they are so different.”
Impressive public art strewn is around the town. At Cunha’s Country Store, there’s a resplendent agri-historical mural from local artist Julie Engelmann. She painted it in 2022 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the pumpkin fest, and it depicts a bounty of artichokes, farm laborers and big, bouncy pumpkins.
“I grew up going to all the pumpkin festivals, and I always remember Half Moon Bay being artsy-and-craftsy,” says Engelmann, who has a studio off Main Street. “And I love (the town) because it’s so preserved, especially in the Bay Area with the crazy tech boom and everything getting so modernized. It’s kept its core identity throughout the years.”
At Cameron’s Pub, patrons can ogle what’s reportedly the largest pumpkin sculpture in the world — a 5-ton monstrosity that would squash James’ Giant Peach. Lake Tahoe artist Peter Hazel built the 12-foot-long thing to pay tribute to the town he grew up in.
“I didn’t want it to be fancy or cute,” Hazel has publicly said. “I really went all out for the beefy, burly, giant pumpkin look.”
Even the mascot of the pumpkin fest has a creative origin story. The bobble-headed Jack-o-Lantern named Gourdy, who stalks the festivities with yellow-glowing eyes — not creepy at all — was fabricated in 2017 by Carol Flemming Costume Design in Valley Springs. That company has made many well-known mascots, such as the San Diego Chicken and The Noid from Domino’s Pizza.
“He still looks pretty damn good,” Carol Flemming says. “He doesn’t look old or smashed. He still has his round shape — sometimes they’ll start to collapse after a number of years.”
When it comes to public thrills, pumpkin carving is way up there.
“One of the bigger things that we expanded this year is all-weekend pumpkin carving,” Fowler says. “Historically, it used to run only two hours, and kids would end up crying because they wanted to keep carving.”
Mike Valladao will operate on 200- to 350-pound pumpkins on his own stage for both days of the festival. (As a professional, he doesn’t touch anything weighing less than a hundo.) A soft-spoken systems engineer for a tech company, come Halloween-time Farmer Mike wears the media-given mantle of the “Picasso of Pumpkin Carvers.” It takes him a minimum of three to four hours to carve one gourd, using his trusty Buck 110 hunting knife and a fair amount of caution.
“I use one hand for finesse — driving the blade — and the other for strength, so in most cases I’m in pretty good shape,” Valladao says. “Where I have to be careful is not doing something silly, like trying to swat a wasp. If I’m on stage and somebody asks, ‘Do you ever draw blood?’ My answer is, ‘Hopefully not today!’”
Valladao sources pumpkins from Borchard Farms in Salinas, which grows a variety called Atlantic Giants that bulge up to 500 pounds. When picking his victim … er, subject … he looks for a thick rind to facilitate three-dimensional details and a frumpy body shape.
“I don’t like the perfectly round pumpkin,” he explains. “I want something that is a little elongated, different, something that sloshes to one side. The best faces are the ones that you bring out the personality in.”
The theme of his show this year is “The Many Faces of Farmer Mike,” and it will showcase all kinds of facial expressions from happy to morose to agitated. In his career he’s carved pumpkins that look like dragons, a phoenix rising from ashes, the Arc de Triomphe, Icelandic trolls and Grogu from “Star Wars.” During a 1994 appearance on “The Tonight Show,” he impressed Jay Leno by carving the largest pumpkin in the world by measurement. It was so big, it had to be airlifted in the belly of a Boeing 747.
“It had started to turn,” he says. “We made the magic we could, and hid the ugly parts.”
Sometimes, the pumpkins he recalls most fondly weren’t made for public consumption. Like when he carved a special one for his cousin’s marriage that featured wedding bells.
“As they came in doing their procession with the bridegroom and everything, she breaks cadence and goes, ‘Oh, my god,’ and ran up and hugged the pumpkin. Her husband at that point was going, ‘What?!’ It was just crazy.”
Details: The Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival runs 9 a.m.-5 p.m. October 18-19 on Main St. between Miramontes and Spruce streets in Half Moon Bay; free admission, hmbpumpkinfest.com
