TodayLocal gourd business is a ‘dirty job’
Meadowbrooke Gourds in Carlisle will be featured on an episode of Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” Tuesday night.
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Josh Ketner, an employee for Meadowbrooke Gourds, uses a high pressure water hose to remove the seeds and debris from the inside of a gourd before it goes to be painted. (Jason Malmont/The Sentinel)
Darren Hartsock talks about what it was like when Mike Rowe and the crew from Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” showed up to learn how to make decorative gourds. (Jason Malmont/The Sentinel)
Sales manager Darren Hartsock couldn’t be any more excited about Meadowbrooke Gourds’ first feature on a nationally syndicated, prime time show.
Even if that means watching the show’s host spend more time covered in gourd guts than perusing the merchandise.
On Tuesday night, the Upper Frankford Township business will be featured on the Discovery Channel series, “Dirty Jobs.”
The show features host Mike Rowe participating in a various number of jobs, which are usually unpleasant to the nose and make particularly large messes.
Once Hartsock heard of the show, he thought Meadowbrooke Gourds seemed to fit that profile of a “dirty job,” with its gourd cleaning and spray finishing. After applying with a video, the staff at Meadowbrooke Gourds had to wait a year, until the spring of this year, when the crew of “Dirty Jobs” started filming on the East Coast again.
Even at that point, Hartsock had to wait another couple of months, until August, when the crew could find a second business in the area to shoot. The Discovery Channel ended up choosing Seltzer’s Bologna in Lebanon.
Once the day of filming finally became reality, Hartsock was only too happy to make sure the back rooms fit the premise of the show.
“We let our washroom go a little,” Hartsock said. “Quite honestly, the washroom stinks, and there are gourd guts everywhere. Before the day of the show, we left a big pile of gourd guts that we would have normally cleaned up, and we left it there all day.”
Hartsock explained that enough gourd guts had piled up to reach someone’s knees, making it perfect for Rowe, even if it was one of the tamer assignments. After all, cleaning and carving gourd ornaments tends to not be as messy as maggot farming or leech trapping -- other jobs the show has profiled.
Dirty work
Still, the job was not without its challenges.
Roger Morrison has worked at Meadowbrooke Gourds for six years, and he helps manage the washroom, where the gourds are taken from the fields, washed and sometimes hollowed out.
While running the gourds through the pool of water and stacking them on the rack is little trouble to Morrison, the act of washing out the gourds tends to make a bit more of a mess.
For the gourds that will turn into hollow ornaments, Morrison and others in the washroom use a water gun to wash out the guts. That was where Rowe’s job came into play.
“The water pressure is pretty high — high enough to cut someone’s hand,” Hartsock said, noting the mixture of water and gourd guts on the floor and warning about the splash zone. “It can break the gourd sometimes, but we prefer that it breaks here instead of later. Most of the gourds do make it through.”
Morrison was just happy to watch how Rowe handled his job.
“He’s exactly the way he is on TV,” Morrison said. “I’d demonstrate the processes for him, and then he’d get to work.”
The “Dirty Jobs” crew, as well as a press crew from the Discovery Channel, also shot video and photographs in other work stations, including the carving area and the finishing area.
“You shouldn’t expect to ever get your clothes clean,” said production manager Shawn Trostle as he watched one of the workers spray finishing on the gourds. “The finishing will splatter all over your clothes, and you get coated up pretty quickly. We don’t come in here with nice clothes on. This can be a very dirty job.”
Preparing the dirty back rooms, however, pays off. Meadowbrooke Gourds sells its ornaments at its store, on its Web page and by catalog. Hartsock hopes the national attention will mean sales all over the country and maybe more tourism for the area.
“They told us to expect a lot of phone calls, especially with the type of specialized product that we sell,” Hartsock said. “We want to have trails down here, so people can see the gourds. We’re a little bit out of the way and there isn’t a good way to get here off of the interstate, but we hope this will become a destination for people. We already had so many people for tours during our open house,” held Nov. 28-29.
The episode airs at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9, on the Discovery Channel. The episode on Selter’s Bologna will air sometime early next year.
