TOPSHAM — On a Wednesday morning in October, the front lawn of the Mid-Coast Presbyterian Church was dotted with more than 1,000 pumpkins of all shapes and sizes. A customer wandered among the pallets, pausing to inspect a few gourds deciding on a selection to take home.

The Topsham church has been selling pumpkins throughout the month of October for roughly 15 years, said Shirley Reese, a congregant who helps run the effort each year. The crops are sourced from a farming operation on the Navajo Nation in Farmington, New Mexico, and distributed by the organization Pumpkin Patch Fundraisers.

Roughly two-thirds of MCPC’s pumpkin profits are returned to the Pumpkin Patch Fundraisers company, which employs roughly 700 Indigenous people during harvest months, according to its website. The church keeps the remainder of the money to fund its operations.

In years in which the pumpkin patch is especially profitable, MCPC donates some proceeds to the Wabanaki Alliance, a coalition of tribes in Maine.

The pumpkin patch is “a win-win for everybody,” Reese said.

No pumpkin goes to waste, as excess or damaged plants are donated to local farms to use as livestock feed.

“I have a list of six or seven farmers that I text each year and say, ‘The pumpkins are here; stop by’ — and within a day, they all go,” Reese said.

Unloading the pumpkins each year is a great undertaking, especially for MCPC’s older congregation, Reese said. Church volunteers have enlisted the help of Mt. Ararat High School’s track teams and several groups that use the church as a meeting space, including Midcoast Youth Theater.

On unloading day, “at about 2:45, the men and women’s track teams come running down the street to a great cheer, and they hop in the truck and we form a pumpkin brigade and pass them hand-to-hand,” Reese said.

In recent years, the pumpkin patch volunteers have searched for an alternative to heavy, waterlogged wooden pallets. A fellow Presbyterian church in New Jersey stepped in.

First Presbyterian Church of Englewood, New Jersey, raised $1,500 in a week’s time to cover the shipping cost of 125 used, lightweight plastic pallets, donated by a supplier also located in New Jersey. Volunteers in Englewood packed and shipped the pallets off to Topsham, which arrived just before the pumpkin delivery this October.

Mid-Coast Presbyterian will be selling pumpkins up until Oct. 31 or whenever the patch is picked clean. It’s open daily off Main Street from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., weather permitting.