Backyard Giants Read online

  Animal lovers will cringe, but many pumpkin growers don't hesitate to kill any creature that dares to mess with their plants. They have too much time and money and work invested in their garden to have any sympathy for a giant rodent foraging for lunch. Growers develop a fierce maternal instinct while tending to their plants day and night—nursing them when they're sick, fussing over them when they're slow, bragging about them when they're doing well. And like a she-bear protecting her cubs, growers can reveal a vicious streak when it comes to defending their botanical babies.

  Even the soft-hearted Wallaces had been known to shoot the woodchucks in their pumpkin patch. But generally Ron tried to avoid it. A few days before they'd taken off the greenhouses this year, Ron had noticed a woodchuck meandering through his garden early one morning. He had immediately set out a trap baited with peanut butter. But he hadn't seen the animal since. "He was kind of cute," Ron said. "He waddled around out there underneath the deer fence."

  "Cute" isn't the word most gardeners would use to describe a woodchuck. They can erect high fences to fend off deer. But woodchucks and their cousins, gophers, are harder to keep out—they can crawl right under a fence or tunnel under other barriers—so most growers prefer to just kill them. The more gentle-natured growers tried to trap them and then relocate them miles away. One year Steve Connolly trapped 14 of the animals at his southern Massachusetts home.

  At the same time the Rhode Island growers were battling woodchucks, a grower in San Diego was on the hunt for a gopher that had moved into his pumpkin patch and was chowing down on one of his plants. The grower, who kept a diary on BigPumpkins.com under the screen name "Duster," already had dispatched one gopher that was plaguing his patch in May. A neighbor had poisoned it for him, and Duster posted a picture in his online diary of the gopher's stiffened carcass with the caption "Ding dong the wicked gopher is dead!!!!!!!!"

  But in June, another, more-persistent gopher arrived. Duster labeled it "the unkillable gopher" after he had made several unsuccessful assassination attempts that included running a hose into the burrow to flood it with water, then laying in wait with a rifle outside its den in hopes of shooting it when it poked out its head. Finally, Duster announced jubilantly on BigPumpkins.com that his seven-day war with the gopher was over. "He survived 4 floodings, two days of trappings, two poison days, one assassination attempt with my gun and today, finally, he was nailed in the last flooding attempt. The hardest gopher I have ever come up against," Duster wrote, brimming with satisfaction over the kill.

  Any pumpkin grower whose patch has borne the brunt of an animal's appetite could sympathize with Duster's homicidal fury at the rodent. When a deer jumped over Jack LaRue's six-foot barrier into his pumpkin patch, Jack said, "I wailed him a couple times on the butt with a fence post. I left a lasting impression. He has not been back."

  Ron was worried about one of his plants. The leaves were splotched bright yellow, and he couldn't figure out why. At first he thought maybe there was something wrong with the dirt in the new patch—a nutrient deficiency, maybe—but then the problem wouldn't be on just one plant, right in the middle of the garden. He watched it closely every day, and by the end of June, it hadn't gotten any better. Then another mystery cropped up. Ron discovered tiny spiderwebs spreading across the top of some of his leaves. He'd picked up the webs and looked closely at them. They were white and gossamer-fine. He let them drift away in the air, sailing on an almost imperceptible breeze. Weird.

  A few days later, Ron noticed sap bubbling up on top of a few leaves, like tiny amber blisters. That was strange too. But he'd just sprayed some fungicide on the plants. Maybe it was condensation beading up and then drying out. Then, it started raining again and it was difficult to do much of anything in the garden for three days. When the rain stopped long enough for Ron to get a good look at his plants, a jolt of panic shot up his spine. The leaves in part of the garden were turning a reddish brown, as if they were covered in rust, old before their time. "My leaves went from looking buff to what-the-helPs-going-on-here!" Ron said.

  From his office at work, he called Steve Jepsen, a fellow grower who also happened to sell pesticide. Jepsen had become the chief chemicals guru of the giant-pumpkin community because of his expertise and his willingness to patiently and promptly address an endless stream of questions from panicky growers. Steve immediately had a suspect in mind. Go home and hold a white sheet of paper underneath one of the rusty leaves, he instructed Ron. Then tap on the top of the leaf and look at the paper. If you see black dots crawling around, you've got spider mites.

  Spider mites are minuscule insects the size of a dust speck that congregate on the bottom of leaves and multiply with dizzying speed, spreading from leaf to leaf until the whole garden is infested. The webbing Ron had seen two weeks ago was a classic sign of infestation. The rusty color was where the mites had literally sucked the life out of the leaves. Ron rushed home from work that afternoon and did the paper test. Sure enough, the paper crawled with black dots. This was a new disaster for the Wallace patch—and by now there weren't many new ones left. Ron's inner samurai leaped forth. He didn't want the spider mites to draw an other breath. He hastily deployed his arsenal of chemicals, filling his sprayer and blasting the plants with a powerful poison.

  Ron hoped that if he could just keep the plants healthy and growing, then he might still be able to pollinate on schedule. Already, female flowers were beginning to appear with their cargo of pea-sized baby pumpkins beneath the closed petals. That was good and bad: Good because it meant the plants knew it was time to start producing pumpkins. Bad because he needed his plants to be as big as possible before pollinating the fruit, and the weather had stunted the plants' growth. Ron and his dad wavered between dismay at the rough start to the season, and optimism that they could still recover. They weren't the only ones hurting. The weather had completely knocked out the plants of several growers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Others growers were set back weeks, making it unlikely they could turn out a competitive pumpkin.

  In their own club, Scott Palmer had to make a trip to the hospital for a hernia operation, which had put him out of commission for a while. Dick and Ron and some of the other growers had gone over to help Scott's wife, Shelley, prune and bury the vines and spray the plants for bugs and fungi. But it was yet another setback on top of the bad weather. Steve Sperry had lost his best plant to the woodchuck. Steve Connolly had a plant damaged by the storm. And now weeds were taking over in the Wallace garden. Ron had used some Roundup weed-killer, but he'd found that some of the chunks of grass sod plowed under in November were taking root with all the rain. He needed to hand-turn the earth, but it was so wet, he couldn't get into the patch.

  "We're in trouble, no doubt about it," Ron admitted. There was still no end in sight to the storms moving through the area day after day. "There's just way too much water. You just can't keep that much water on the plants, or you're asking for problems." When he forced himself to be realistic, he knew it wasn't likely they'd be able to grow any world-class specimens this year.

  But Ron wasn't admitting defeat. He couldn't do all the backbreaking work that lay ahead without believing they still had a chance. The bad weather was bound to end. And in the meantime, the plants were doing their part. They were getting bigger, and despite everything, they looked good. "They're ready to go," Ron said. "Now we'll see what happens."

  In Pennsylvania, Dave Stelts sympathized with the New England growers. But he had his own pumpkins to worry about and so far he was satisfied with the way things were going. His area had suffered some of the same turbulent weather as the Northeast, though nothing as constant or severe. Dave's home was right on the Ohio border northeast of Pittsburgh. Technically, he lived in Pennsylvania, but he had grown up in Ohio and had only recently moved over the state line, so he still considered the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers his home club. He hung out with the growers from Ohio, and that's where he took his pumpkins for the weigh-off.

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nbsp; Dave Stelts made no bones about why he grew giant pumpkins: He grew because his life depended on it. Dave was a burly 47-year-old tractor salesman, with a head of thick, brown hair and bushy eyebrows that stretched seamlessly over hazel-brown eyes—inspiring Dick Wallace to nickname him "the Uni-Brow." He had a slightly manic personality, a ferocious competitive instinct, and a sense of humor that cut straight to the harsh reality of a matter. He also was a recovering alcoholic who had stopped drinking when he scraped rock bottom in the early 1990s.

  Dave's interest in gardening dated back to his childhood, when he'd helped his father in the family vegetable garden. Back then, Dave and his dad grew what he now disdains as "small, tedious vegetables"—tomatoes and green beans and such. When he was 13 or 14 years old, he saw a picture of a great big orange pumpkin in a Burpee Seeds catalog and decided that was what he wanted to grow. "I wanted the 'Wow' factor—the biggest, orangest pumpkin I could get. And that's still the way I am today," he said. With his father's help, Dave grew two pumpkins over 100 pounds when he was still in high school.

  But then he grew up, went to college, and moved to Florida on his own, where he proceeded to live life as fast as possible, which included a lot of hard drinking. He married and then divorced. He moved back to Ohio in his 30s and, with a partner, opened up a bar and restaurant. It was a bad idea. "I was my best customer," Dave said.

  Dave gave up the business and checked himself into rehab. His last drink was October 13, 1993. Dave's therapist suggested he find a hobby to concentrate on to help him stay sober. So he went back to growing pumpkins with his father. They joined the Ohio Valley pumpkin-growing club, and with the advice and guidance of more-expert growers, he and his father managed to grow a 447pounder their second year. "I am still dry to this day," Dave said. "Because I focus all my obsessive-compulsive tendencies on my pumpkins."

  Dave married his wife, Carol in 2004. They had dated for five years, "so she knew what she was getting into," he said. "She indulges me, and she gets out there and helps." Carol had become an expert at pruning and burying vines—she called it "manicuring" the plants. "In the summertime, if she wants to spend time with me, she knows that's where she has to go," Dave said.

  Dave and Carol built a house on a steep hillside in Edinburg, Pennsylvania. A spare bedroom serves as Dave's pumpkin headquarters, filled with weigh-off ribbons and plaques. Two pieces of dried pumpkin vine tied with a red-and-gold-plaid ribbon are mounted high on one wall. They're from the 1,140-pound pumpkin that won Dave his world record in 2000. That win gave him bragging rights to having grown the biggest pumpkin of the 20th century. But it hadn't dulled his competitive drive one bit. Dave still grew to win every time, and he was banking on 2006 being his best year yet.

  Dave had launched the 2006 season with his usual proficiency. He breezed through germination, and his plants had gone into the ground right on schedule, the first week of May—all except his 1068, which hadn't sprouted. But the plant Ron sent by FedEx arrived in pristine shape. Dave's Ohio-Pennsylvania region was notorious for its roller-coaster weather—highs in the 50s one day and in the 90s the next. The dramatic temperature swings were hard on the pumpkins. But Dave would take his weather any day over what he saw happening in New England that year. "I feel bad for them. But it's just their turn to have crappy weather," he said. "If they're gonna get to thirteen or fourteen hundred pounds this year, somebody's going to need a rabbit foot."

  Dave reckoned the West Coast was having the best weather. "They have a leg up on everybody." But the Ohio Valley growers were doing well too. They'd had their share of spring storms and rain, but most of the growers had come through without much damage. Everyone was still on track. If fortune smiled, Dave believed his Ohio club was primed to snatch the top growing award away from Rhode Island this year.

  In the Pacific Northwest, rain had cooled things down in late May, but Jack and Sherry LaRue hadn't minded a bit. The rain fell at night and then the clouds cleared away during the day, warming the air and giving the plants plenty of sunshine. "The weather has been just about perfect," Jack said. "The way it's setting up right now, we're in great shape."

  The LaRues had spent most of the spring in their pumpkin patch. Their no-till method had minimized the weeds they had to deal with, but they still had plenty of work laying down manure and compost and putting up some more permanent greenhouses to replace the temporary ones they'd been using. Jack had decided to grow 20 plants, and Sherry 4. Most of Jack's lineup was made up of his own seeds, all 1,000-plus-pounders, but he also was growing a selection of East Coast genetics, including a 1469 Checkon, a 1333 Connolly, a 1370 Rose, and a 1225 Jutras. He and Sherry each were growing a 1068 Wallace.

  They'd had no trouble germinating their seeds, which were in the greenhouses and growing by early May. There'd been just one hitch so far that spring. "I'm not exactly sure what I had going on," Jack said. Some of his plants had a puzzling affliction that resembled salt burn—a leaf-browning that occurs when the plant gets too much salt, usually from some kind of fertilizer or soil supplement. "Basically, the plants stopped growing," he said. "The leaves turned yellow and the leaf margins started to rot off." The same thing had happened in 2002, and though it wasn't as bad this time, it still worried him. He suspected the magnesium supplement he'd put on the plants had too much salt in it, so he flooded the patch with water, hoping to flush any excess out of the soil. The plants did better after that, especially his 1157 LaRue. "My n 5 7 came out of that salt burn and it was pissed!" Jack said. "I can't believe how much growth it's put on in the last couple of days." In fact, now the n 57 was probably the best plant in his patch. "Sometimes a little stress on these things just makes them try harder," Jack said. Last year he'd almost pulled out one plant—his 1068, in fact—because it looked so puny and pathetic. Then it wound up growing his biggest pumpkin.

  The covers came off their greenhouses the first week in June. Sherry's 1068 had been the first to grow long enough to hit the greenhouse wall. Jack's 1068s were coming along more slowly. He had two now. A nearby grower had decided his 1068 seedling was too small and puny to plant, so he'd offered it to Jack. "Since Mr. Obsessive Pumpkin Grower can never turn down a needy seed, Jack took it," Sherry said.

  For much of June, Sherry had battled a flat-vine problem on two of her plants, including her 1354 Checkon—the seed that had grown the current world-record winner. Flat vines, one of the many botanical riddles growers face, are basically a plant deformity. Instead of a single main vine, the plant grows two, which fuse together into a flat, ridged shape. The flattened vines are sometimes called "ribbon vines," and plant scientists know the problem as "fasciation." At the leaf nodes, the plant grows twice the number of leaves, twice the number of side vines, and twice the number of tendrils. Growers weren't exactly sure how flat vines affected the size of their pumpkins, but since it wasn't normal, it didn't seem like a good thing. The cause was also a mystery—growers didn't know whether the mutation was organic or genetic. Sherry had hoped the problem would correct itself on her two plants, and the vines would start growing normally, as they sometimes did. But when it didn't, she cut off the flattened main vines and trained normal-looking side vines to replace them.

  Other than that, the LaRues so far were having one of their best seasons. Baby pumpkins had begun showing up on all their plants. Pollination time was right around the corner.

  9

  The Killer Cross

  RON AND DICK spent the afternoon of July 5 working in the pumpkin patch. Summer was in full bloom at the Wallace homestead. The air was filled with the singsong of finches and sparrows and flocks of other birds attracted by the whimsical wooden birdhouses and birdfeeders Dick had made and scattered throughout the trees on the property. The sky was overcast, threatening rain, and the warm air was heavy with humidity. The Wallaces' sandy loam soil had managed to absorb the recent rains, and there were no puddles in sight. The ground was wet and spongy but still firm underfoot.

  As Dick walked across t
he lawn from the house to the garden, the goats caught a glimpse of him and began bleating for attention. The rabbits stirred and thumped in their hutches. They had been multiplying, as rabbits will, so Dick and Ron had more animals to feed than ever. Dick took care of that chore while Ron was busy in the garage, pulling out his Stihl sprayer. His plants were due for a dose of organic fertilizer, and for such a big garden, Ron needed a heavy-duty piece of equipment. The sprayer included a motor and a pump with a 3.7-gallon tank, which could be filled with all of a grower's essential brews, from pesticides and fungicides to liquid fertilizers. Shoulder straps allowed Ron to mount the sprayer unit on his back. A long, black, bazooka-like nozzle curved from the tank and jutted out 2 feet in front. Ron gripped a handle extending up from the nozzle to guide the spray in slow, wide arcs back and forth across the plants. The sprayer made it easy for him to move around the patch unencumbered by garden hoses and without having to return for frequent fillups.

  Before filling the sprayer's tank, he rinsed it out with the garden hose to avoid mixing the last application of pesticide with the fertilizer spray. Dick, finished feeding the animals, walked over to a 25-gallon black plastic container labeled "Soil Soup" that was sitting atop a table next to the garden. He flipped a switch and the container rumbled to life with a low, vibrating hum. It was a system for making compost tea—a rank mixture of water, manure, compost, and just about anything else a grower cares to throw in: molasses, seaweed, banana peels. The switch turned on an electric pump that gurgled air through the container, mixing the microbe-rich brew with oxygen and speeding the fermentation of ingredients. Ron filled his sprayer tank with the Soil Soup. The sprayer would atomize the liquid fertilizer and envelop the plants in a nutrient-rich mist.