The Best Pie Pumpkin Showdown: Dickinson vs Long Island Cheese

If you are deciding between Dickinson vs Long Island Cheese pumpkin for your pie patch, here is the short answer: grow Dickinson when you want the most dense, bakeable flesh from the fewest plants, and grow Long Island Cheese when you want a smaller, sweeter fruit that is easier to handle in a home kitchen. Both are Cucurbita moschata heirlooms, both are open-pollinated, and both carry the thick-stemmed vine borer resistance that makes moschata the only pie pumpkin species we recommend for Kansas gardens.

Dickinson vs Long Island Cheese pumpkin at a glance

These two varieties get confused constantly, and it is easy to see why. Both are tan rather than orange. Both are moschata. Both end up in pie. But in the patch and on the cutting board they behave very differently.

	Dickinson	Long Island Cheese
Fruit size	Large, often 10 to 20 lbs	Medium, 6 to 10 lbs
Shape	Elongated, blocky, shouldered	Flat and lobed, like a wheel of cheese
Days to maturity	100 to 115	100 to 110
Flesh	Very dense, deep orange, low moisture	Smooth, fine-grained, moderately sweet
Best use	Bulk puree, canning, freezing	Fresh pie, soup, roasting
Vine borer	Resistant (moschata)	Resistant (moschata)

What Dickinson brings to the pie

Dickinson is the pumpkin behind the canned stuff. The commercial strain used by the big label is a selection of this variety, which is why a slice of Dickinson pie tastes like the pie most Americans grew up on. Its flesh is remarkably dry for a winter squash, and that matters more than sweetness does. Wet flesh means a puree you have to cook down for an hour before it will set in a crust. Dickinson comes out of the oven already close to the right consistency.

The other argument for Dickinson is yield per square foot of patch. A single healthy vine can set two or three fruits in the 10 to 20 pound range, and one of those fruits is a season's worth of puree for a family that bakes. If you are freezing or canning in batches, that is the variety that pays for its trellis space. Our Dickinson growing guide walks through spacing, timing and the mid-May sowing window that gets it ripe before a Kansas frost.

The tradeoff is handling. A 20 pound pumpkin is awkward to carry, awkward to cut, and it will not fit in a standard kitchen sink. You need a heavy knife, a stable board, and a plan for the whole fruit once you open it.

What Long Island Cheese brings to the pie

Long Island Cheese is the gardener's pie pumpkin. It has been grown on the East Coast since the 1800s and it survived because people kept choosing it, not because any seed company promoted it. The fruit is a flattened, lobed, buff-colored wheel, and it is genuinely pretty enough to sit on a porch through October before you cook it.

At 6 to 10 pounds it is a one-afternoon pumpkin. You can lift it with one hand, halve it without a cleaver, and roast both halves on a single sheet pan. The flesh is finer-grained than Dickinson and reads a little sweeter, which makes it the better choice if you are baking a pie or two at a time rather than putting up a freezer full. It also makes better soup, because the texture purees silky instead of pasty. The Long Island Cheese growing guide has the full variety detail.

Flavor and texture, honestly compared

We should be careful here, because flavor in winter squash is not fixed by variety alone. Both of these pumpkins get sweeter with proper curing, and a badly cured Long Island Cheese will lose a blind taste test to a well-cured Dickinson every time. Sugars keep developing for weeks after harvest. If you want the real difference between the two, cure both for ten to fourteen days and taste them side by side in November, not in the first week of October.

With that said: Dickinson is deeper and more savory, almost sweet-potato-like. Long Island Cheese is lighter, sweeter, and a touch more floral. Neither is wrong. In a spiced pie with cinnamon and ginger doing most of the talking, the difference narrows considerably.

Which one should you grow in Kansas?

If your patch is small

Grow Long Island Cheese. Smaller fruits mean the vine is not pouring everything into two giants, and the plant tolerates a tighter footprint. You will also actually use what you harvest, which is the quiet problem with big pumpkins in a two-person household.

If you bake in bulk or sell at market

Grow Dickinson. Dense, low-moisture flesh is what makes puree worth the work, and the yield per plant is hard to beat. Pair it with our guide to making puree from scratch so the first big fruit does not sit on the counter while you figure out the method.

If you cannot decide

Grow both. They have the same season length and the same culture, so nothing about your calendar changes. The pie pumpkin seed duo exists for exactly this reason, and growing them side by side in one season will settle the question for your kitchen better than any article can.

One thing to know before you save seed from either

Dickinson and Long Island Cheese are both open-pollinated, so saved seed grows true to type, but only if the flowers were pollinated by the same variety. They are both Cucurbita moschata, which means they will cross with each other freely, and with butternut, Seminole, and every other moschata in your patch. If you plant them next to each other and save seed from the result, next year's fruit will be something new and unpredictable.

That is a fine thing to do on purpose and a frustrating thing to discover by accident. If seed purity matters to you, hand-pollinate and bag the flowers, or grow only one moschata variety for seed in a given season and buy fresh seed for the other.

Harvest, curing and storage

Both varieties are ready when the rind resists a thumbnail and the stem has gone corky and dry. Cut the stem long, handle the fruit by the body rather than the stem, and cure in a warm dry spot for ten to fourteen days before moving to cool storage. Cured properly, Long Island Cheese will hold into late winter and Dickinson often longer, which is part of why both have stayed in gardens for well over a century. For the full method, see our guide to curing pumpkins and winter squash for storage.

The verdict

In a straight Dickinson vs Long Island Cheese pumpkin comparison there is no loser, only a fit. Dickinson is the workhorse: more flesh, drier flesh, better economics if you are putting food up for the year. Long Island Cheese is the gardener's pick: easier to grow in a small patch, easier to cook, prettier on the step, and sweeter straight out of the oven. Both shrug off squash vine borers in a way that no Cucurbita pepo sugar pie ever will, and in Kansas that resistance is the whole reason either one is on our shelf.

Ready to settle it in your own patch? Start with the Dickinson and Long Island Cheese seed duo, or browse the full pie pumpkin collection to see what else is ripening this season.

All seeds ship from Newton, Kansas. Free shipping on qualifying US orders.