RALEIGH - David Clark cocked his head and studied a $28 pumpkin for sale at the N.C. State Farmers Market like an artist sizing up a canvas. Kind of lumpy, but a nice shape. Too bad it wasn't a bit bigger.

"If they're a decent size, you can do a design on four sides," said Clark, who was thinking of carving a castle into one face of the orange orb.

There are plenty of pumpkins to choose from this year, but growers say they aren't as big as they ought to be. Pumpkins are about 90 percent water, and the drought kept most of the ones grown in North Carolina from reaching their proper girth.

"These pumpkins right here should be twice this size and about twice this heavy," said John Bynum, standing beside a knee-high Prizewinner variety at his market stall. Bynum Greenhouse and Pumpkin Farm has 14 varieties of pumpkins and gourds on 41 acres near Garner, and there were days this year when Bynum didn't think any of them would make it to market.

Pumpkins need a soaking rain -- an inch is about right -- three times in the growing cycle, Bynum said: once to germinate the seeds, once to set the fruit and once after the pumpkins are established.

"These pumpkins right here," Bynum said, thumping a $6 specimen the color of a harvest moon, "have never seen a drop of rain in their lives."

It rained once on the vines before the fruit appeared, Bynum said, and not a drop since.

The drought, coupled with the heat that stretched into fall, forced an early harvest, Bynum said. Normally, he picks pumpkins in September. This year, he had to snatch them out of the field in mid- to late August because the vines were drying up. Once that happens, he said, the vines will begin to pull moisture from the pumpkins, causing them to cave in.

To ensure they would last until Halloween, Bynum and his mother, Elsie, co-owner of the farm, cured the pumpkins in a barn, using fans to circulate the air and reduce the humidity.

"If we hadn't gotten them up, I'd have absolutely nothing," Bynum said.

Monica Wood, a marketing specialist with the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, said pumpkins are grown on 3,000 to 4,000 acres from one end of the state to the other. Wood couldn't say what the crop is worth but said this year's harvest would be below normal -- the pampered, record-setting giants on display at the market and the State Fair notwithstanding.

Theron Maybin grows a few pumpkins every year along with his apples, potatoes and other crops in Henderson County, south of Asheville. He has some help from his grandchildren, Lauren and Larance, who each entered a pumpkin in the children's division at this year's N.C. State Fair competition.

Maybin says pumpkins can be tricky to grow successfully because they require consistent weather. Too dry and they don't develop fully. Too wet and they rot.

That's why Pam Griffin has a neighbor plant two-thirds of an acre of small pie pumpkins at Hector's Creek Farm in Fuquay-Varina and buys a bunch more at the farmers market. She gives the smaller ones away to schoolchildren who come to the farm for the corn maze, and uses the larger ones to decorate.

"Last year I made the mistake of not having pumpkins on the farm the first weekend we opened, and people turned away. Little kids, moms and dads, they think they have to have a pumpkin," Griffin said. "You have a Christmas tree at Christmas, a turkey at Thanksgiving and at Halloween, you're going to have a pumpkin."