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Giant Pumpkins Smash Records

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By ANNE RAVER of The New York Times

Published: October 22, 2007

The record for the world's largest pumpkin was about 460 pounds until 1981, when Howard Dill, a grower in Nova Scotia, came up with one that was close to 500 pounds.

He patented the seed, and growers around the world jumped to buy Dill's Atlantic Giant. As they crossed and recrossed varieties, the pumpkins grew ever larger; by 1994, the symbol of Halloween had passed the 1,000-pound mark.

"Basically, they all came from the Atlantic Giant," Sue Jutras said, standing in the family's pumpkin patch in North Scituate, R.I., where her husband, Joe, grew the 1,689-pounder that broke the world record this year.

But he is not satisfied with that achievement. Beautiful orange pumpkins tend to be lighter, with thinner shells. Their buff-colored, dense-fleshed cousins usually are the ones to break the records.

"Joe's trying to get the best of both," Jutras said. "An orange one that's heavy."

Joe Jutras' baby, the color of a Creamsicle, surpassed a 1,566-pounder grown by Bill Rodonis in Litchfield, N.H., that only 25 minutes earlier had broken the 2006 record set by a 1,502-pounder grown by Ron Wallace in Greene, R.I.

"It was a bittersweet moment," Rodonis, a farmer, said of his fleeting victory. "But no one can take that away from me."

The weigh-off, at the Topsfield (Mass.) Fair on Sept. 29, was one of dozens taking place across the country.

"I would think that 2,000 pounds is not out of the question anymore," said Joe Jutras, who was taking part in his local club's weigh-off a week later at Frerichs Farm in Warren, R.I.

Jutras had donated a 1,000-pound squash, just to be dropped from the air and smashed, to open the ceremonies. Forty-five pumpkins, from classic orange to buff to white, were lined up in a field surrounded by bleachers full of fans and a bandstand, complete with rock band and pumpkin cheerleaders, the latter wearing orange wigs and gyrating onstage.

Forklifts trundled each entry to a scale to be weighed, from the smallest, an orange 142-pound beauty, to the thousand-pounders and up.

As they get bigger, these supersize vegetables take on the unfortunate appearance of terribly obese humans, stretched beyond the capacity of their skins. They can be lopsided or collapsed-looking, with flattened bottoms, as if unable to support their weight.

No matter. The bigger the better in the giant pumpkin world.

"This might be the biggest crowd in the history of the pumpkin growers' weigh-off," Wallace, the club president, said into his microphone at the Warren weigh-off.

"For competitive people like myself, the scale is our accomplishment," he said. "It's just fascinating to see something grow that big."

Wallace said his biggest pumpkin of this year, a 1,470-pounder, is headed for the "Late Show With David Letterman."

"I'm going to get the seeds out," Wallace said. "Then they'll pack it with dynamite and blow it up."

Last year's explosion on the Letterman show, viewable online at videosite.com/video/3555, was spectacular. In fact, this is something of a subculture; just search at google.com for "explosion" and "pumpkins.")

Last year, Wallace's record-breaker sold for $6,000 to Grand Central Terminal in New York.

Jutras is still waiting to see who bids the most for his record-breaker, which already earned him $5,000 in prize money at Topsfield. He said he could not talk about negotiations.

Wallace said, "The top carvers in the world will be battling out who gets to carve it."

Not before Jutras gets his seeds out, of course. He and others will grow them to see whether they can produce massive progeny once more.

"If it doesn't grow two or three substantial pumpkins, that seed will fall off the map," Wallace said. "If they get a handful of 1,500-, 1,600-pound pumpkins, that's hot seed stock."

A seed from one of Wallace's pumpkins once sold for $850.

In the winter, these local growers can be found in Jutras' woodworking shop, building mini-greenhouses for the pumpkin seedlings, which must be planted in early May in warm ground.

They start their seeds indoors, toward the end of April, in a sterile mix that has been inoculated with fungi that set up a symbiotic relationship with plant rootlets, helping them absorb nutrients and fend off diseases as the pumpkin plant develops.

The plants go outside into the mini-greenhouses as soon as the baby plant's first true leaf appears. Once the main vine has grown to the edge of its greenhouse's wall, it's time to remove the protection of the house, though lightweight covers made of spun plastic are usually at hand if nights turn cool.

Then comes the mad race to keep up with vines that can grow three feet a day, coursing over the 750 square feet of fertile loam ideally allocated to each plant. The vines are buried to encourage roots to grow, drawing more nutrients out of the soil to feed only a few favored gourds to ripen on the main stem.

Each pumpkin plant drinks 60 gallons of water a day. Growers love the kind of hot, dry season they just had -- because they can control the water -- rather than to watch helplessly during a deluge. Too many pumpkins have split because of too much water, bursting a grower's dream.

Miracle-Gro used to be the magic ingredient. Now it's sea kelp and secret ingredients for compost tea. And mycorrhizae -- the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots -- is on the lips of the champions these days.

"We inoculate our potting soil to get the seedlings off to a good start," Wallace said. "Imagine your whole garden just one happy campground of mycorrhizae, bringing nutrients to that pumpkin."

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