‘Like having fresh flowers’: Glencoe farmer debuts pumpkin delivery, curation for fall season

Warty goblin, giant Atlantic, batwing, Cinderella, gooseneck, flat white boer and caveman club. 

These are just some of the types of pumpkins that Rachel Mikolajczyk grows on her family farm in Lake County, and, come this fall, the Glencoe native will be delivering curated displays of the gourds to front porches all across the North Shore for the first official season of her new business, Curated Harvest. 

“It’s just a happy time of year, the colors, and I know it brings a lot of happiness and joy to people,” Mikolajczyk said of the seasonal displays. “People really enjoy walking home and seeing that makes it warm and inviting. So I’m very excited to be bringing this here and sharing it with others.”

Mikolajczyk is now accepting orders to furnish customized packages of locally grown pumpkins, gourds and autumnal flowers — ranging in volume, intricacy and price ($400 to $1,650)— to doorsteps as far west as Aurora and as far north as Zion starting on Oct. 1. 

Channeling her grandmother, an herbalist, and her mother, an architect who always decorated the front yard for Halloween, Mikolajczyk began planting pumpkins in her backyard 20 years ago. 

She loved the gourds’ vibrant fall colors and started decorating her own porch with the hundreds of pumpkins she harvested in surplus, but it’s unlikely she would have made a yearly tradition out of the displays if her children hadn’t come to love them so much, Mikolajczyk said.

A professional interior designer, Mikolajczyk has worked for brands like Starbucks and Neiman Marcus to facilitate the flow of their retail spaces, where lights, walls and products are placed. 

She applied her eye for aesthetics to curating her own seasonal displays and eventually began filling out friends’ and family members’ front porches too. Over time, neighbors began to notice.

“People would always say to me, ‘You should really make a business, you should really do this. Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’” Mikolajczyk said. 

The venture came closer to becoming a reality when Mikolajczyk bought a farm in 2020. Similar to her pumpkins, Mikolajczyk said her brother has been growing gourmet mushrooms for almost 15 years, and together they also grow other specialty crops, such as a variety of tomatoes. 

Now with the increased acreage, Mikolajczyk said she has plenty of space to grow more pumpkins — some weighing hundreds of pounds — and actually bring the gourds to people across the North Shore, not just those in Glencoe. 

Curated Harvest caters to those who might want to support a local farmer but lack time to curate their own seasonal displays. That said, Mikolajczyk said she’s also happy to deliver the packages to families who want to arrange the materials together as a group activity. 

As an add-on service, Mikolajczyk will also return to pick up all of the gourds she delivered and then compost them back on her farm. That way, one years’ batch enters a cycle to feed the next. 

While orders ideally begin to fill up from her new website, Mikolajczyk said she plans to harvest all the 1,500 gourds she planted in June during the first few weeks of September.

Granted people understand the appeal, she plans to double that amount planted next year.

“The satisfaction of coming home, it’s done, they don’t have to do it and it looks good, they enjoy it for the season,” Mikolajczyk said. “We have nice falls, but the days get darker, they’re shorter and having that pop of color walking home, it’s like having fresh flowers. It’s just happy.”

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