They met at Tim's Pumpkin Patch in Marcellus when they were 12.
Marcellus, NY - Kelly Carr and Michael Rogalia Jr. were 12 when they first met while working at Tim’s Pumpkin Patch in Marcellus.
Rogalia asked her on their first date five years later while working there. Last year, Rogalia got on a knee and proposed in the middle of the pumpkins and other gourds.
The longtime friends from Skaneateles were married under a brilliant blue sky Sunday in a 10,000-square-foot plot of grass they’d planted on a rise in that same pumpkin patch. More than 200 guests sat on 120 hay bales covered with white fabric tied with brown mesh material.
More than 50,000 pumpkins dotted the rolling fields around the ceremony, like orange heads poking out of the ground to catch a glimpse.
The altar was a bale of hay, under an arbor of branches Rogalia had pulled from the woods and cobbled together. The guests took a wagon ride behind a tractor to the wedding site about a half-mile from Rose Hill Road. When she walked down the aisle, the train of Kelly’s dress momentarily gathered a few fallen leaves.
It was the first-ever wedding in the pumpkin patch owned by Tim and Erica Leubner.
Rogalia and Carr, both 24, in July cleared the little spot for the ceremony then planted it with grass seed. They mowed it once a week since then, Tim Leubner said.
When they checked the field a few days ago, Carr was concerned that the nearby pumpkins were covered by so many weeds that they couldn’t be seen, Leubner said. So the couple and their families picked all the pumpkins within about 30 yards of the grassy area, cleaned out all the weeds, then put the pumpkins back.
“Then Kelly said, ‘Now I just need to get the leaves to change color on the trees,’” Leubner said. “I told her we couldn’t help her there.”
Rogalia, an electrician, took Carr to the pumpkin patch Oct. 18 of last year, ostensibly to find the perfect pumpkin for his mother, said Carr, a hair stylist.
“So we’re out in the middle of the patch,” she said last week. “He keeps picking up pumpkins and saying, ‘Oh, this one’s not good enough and that one’s not good enough. I’m getting annoyed. I want to go home. Finally, he bends over and picks up a pumpkin. His exact words were, ‘This pumpkin is pretty perfect. But not as perfect as you.’ Kind of corny, huh?”
Then he popped the question and she said yes after first jokingly saying no.
The wedding day held special significance for Rogalia and his family. When he was 14 months old, doctors told his family he had cancer and that he would probably not survive more than a few days. He spent the next two years in and out of the hospital and beat the disease.
”A miracle,” his father, Michael Rogalia Sr., said after the wedding.
John O’Brien can be reached at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.