Labrador librarian Sarah Papple knitted sweaters for six pumpkins to keep off the frost

Sarah Papple, the librarian at Memorial University’s Labrador Campus in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, has knitted sweaters for six pumpkins, CBC News reported on 21 October.

“I knit, but I’ve never knit a sweater for a vegetable, nor for the purpose of saving the vegetable’s life,” she said.

The growing season in Labrador is short. “Pumpkins have thin skin and they get nice and big, and then they stop growing because we get the frost,” Papple said.

She got the idea talking to farmers at the Pye Centre for Northern Boreal Food Systems, a research farm linked to the campus. One farmer threw old coats over their pumpkins on frosty nights. “Naturally I thought, well, they would prefer, instead of an old jacket thrown over them, a little jaunty sweater,” she said.

She looked online for a pattern and found nothing, so she designed one. There were no pumpkins in the shops that summer, so she tried her first sweater on the biggest watermelon she could find. It “couldn’t get past the waistline” of a real pumpkin.

The farmers told her to stay away from yellow yarn, because it attracts pests. The finished sweaters are natural wool in a thick rib, with room for the pumpkins to grow.

“This is new science. We’re not sure. It’s a new frontier,” she told CBC in August. By October, CBC reported, the results were promising.