Backyard Giants Read online

  There was much discussion about fund-raising and prize money, but little was decided. The club wanted to increase its prize money for the weigh-off—which went up to $3,000 for first place—but first they needed to find out if several sponsors would be coming through with donations. After Ron ran through his agenda and adjourned the meeting, the growers lingered. Talk turned to the ethics of killing animals who invaded their pumpkin patches. As Webmaster, Ken Desrosiers had recently been flooded with complaints after a grower posted a picture in his BigPumpkins.com diary of a pesky gopher he had chopped to pieces with a shovel. Ken slapped a CENSORED banner over the photo to obscure the grisly image. But debate still raged over the incident, with some siding with the grower, and some with the gopher.

  "We all know the only good woodchuck is a dead wood­chuck," declared Jeff Blais, a fortyish truck driver with lean, muscled arms and sharp eyes that didn't miss much. He had two hobbies: growing pumpkins and drag racing.

  "Hey, let's put it this way," said Ron. "Have I killed a woodchuck before? Yes I have. Have I caught them and taken them ten miles away in a trap and let them go? I've done that more times than I've shot 'em. If I had to kill a woodchuck, I'd do it quick and painless with a .22 to the head. I wouldn't have it in me to take a shovel to it. I couldn't do that."

  "The world's smallest violin is playing," said Jeff.

  "Hey, everybody's got their own way of doing things," Ron acknowledged.

  "I would have taken that rat down to the reservoir for a nice trip in a submarine," Jeff noted.

  The night was wearing on. Jeff yawned and stretched in his green plastic lawn chair, peering from under the brim of his baseball cap with a wide grin on his face. "Okay, boys," he an nounced. "I need to get goin'. Gotta get up early in the morning for sex." Pollination inspired a lot of jokes like that.

  As the growers pushed back their chairs and rose to their feet to leave, Dick walked over to Scott, who had spent the meeting leaning up against the door jamb of the porch, occasionally tilting his head back to peer in at the raucous goings-on. "You've got to admit," Dick said, "if the average citizen walked into this room and looked around, they'd say, 'What a bunch of weirdos these people are!' "

  "Yeah," Scott said, "then they'd shut and lock the door."

  The next morning, July 6, dawned in Rhode Island with charcoal skies and a light, steady rain. The Wallaces had two female flowers ready to pollinate, but Ron didn't rush out at the crack of dawn to pollinate anymore. Wiser, or maybe just more tired, he had reasoned that waiting a couple hours after sunup might be better; it would give the pollen more time to ripen, developing into a grainy powder that would fly freely off the stamen and maybe even do the job more efficiently.

  It's not hard to understand why hand-pollinating giant pumpkins generates so many jokes. The large male and female flowers have prominent reproductive organs that make comparisons to human sex unavoidable. The male flower's sturdy, inch-long stamen juts up aggressively from the center, its rounded tip packed with grains of bright-yellow pollen. The female flower has its corresponding stigma, a nubby, lobed structure with openings designed to receive the pollen.

  Even when the petals are closed, the male and female flowers are easy to tell apart. Male blooms are the first to appear on the plant. They are simple flowers, rising up from the vine on long, slender stems. The females are generally closer to the vine, with each bloom sitting atop a baby pumpkin. The females are rarer, emerging at the tip of new vine growth, and first noticeable as a pale-green or yellow bead buried in the leaf buds. As the leaves mature, the bead grows along with the flower bud. By the time the female flower opens for pollination, its pumpkin has swelled to the size of a small egg.

  The petals are brilliant orange or yellow and open into a trumpet shape. The blooms are the size of a saucer. Their bright color and sweet fragrance act as a beacon to guide bees into their male or female landing pads. The flowers open early in the morning, and close in the afternoon, providing a window of several hours for pollination. Growers get just one chance to pollinate each female. The flowers close again by the end of the day, then shrivel up to form the blossom end of the growing pumpkins.

  The male pollen carries the male's genetic material. When a female flower's stigma receives a grain of pollen, it forms a tube that carries the pollen down inside the baby pumpkin. Each pollen grain fertilizes an ovule, or seed. A successful pollination signals the plant to begin growing its pumpkin, where the seeds will mature along with the fruit.

  It doesn't take long for a grower to learn to predict when the male and female flowers are about to open: the five-inch, teardrop-shaped buds suddenly blush a pale orange, and the tips of the petals loosen slightly. During pollination time, growers scour their patch every evening to pinpoint females that would open the next morning. Then they slip ziplock baggies over each ripening female bloom, sealing them as close to the stem as possible to keep out bees and other insects. If a bug gets to the flower first, it could ruin the genetic pedigree of the pumpkin. Who knows where that bee has been? It could be carrying pollen from another, unknown pumpkin plant and that pollen could end up fertilizing the female flower. The resulting pumpkin could still be grown, of course, but with questionable parentage, its seeds would be bastards, and no one wants to plant bastard seeds.

  Though Ron wouldn't pollinate until later that morning, he still had roused himself early to get some others chores done in the garden before he had to leave for work. He was hunched over in a drizzling rain by 7 A.M., his red jacket a bright spot of color in the gray morning. The mellow light intensified the colors of the garden, making the grass and pumpkin plants and surrounding trees glow a deep green. A weather front that had moved through overnight had brought cooler temperatures; it felt more like fall than summer.

  Ron was crouched on his hands and knees, undeterred by the wetness, burying vines. It had to be done. His right knee, clad in a knee pad, rested on a two-by-four. His leather-booted left foot was planted on his trusty jumbo-sized cookie sheet. A blue baseball cap shielded his eyes from the rain as he scraped away wet dirt with his hand, slowly placed the vine in the shallow trench, covered it back up, and then staked the end of the vine down with slender stalks of bamboo.

  Ron stooped over to examine a female flower crowded next to a leaf, the same leaf Ron had debated cutting off with Joe the evening before. The leaf's bristly stem had rubbed a raw spot into the tender skin of the baby pumpkin forming beneath the flower bud. If he ended up keeping that pumpkin, the raw spot would form a scar that would grow with the pumpkin, ending up as a big, ugly rough patch. "That's a prime example of why I take the leaf," Ron said, pulling out a pocketknife and creeping in closer to cut the stem off near the vine. "I need to go real slow so that I don't nick the pumpkin," he said. He cut away the leaf and tossed it to one side. Then he went to fetch a lawn chair. The big leaf had been the baby pumpkin's umbrella, and now a chair would have to provide its shade and shelter.

  Ron retreated from the rain, which was beginning to fall faster. He was worried about work. He didn't have to leave for the office until 11 A.M. or so, since he usually worked long past dark in the summer. But the rain meant the country club pool wouldn't be able to open. And he didn't want his staff to be standing around getting paid with nothing to do. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket as he walked toward the house and called one of his assistants at the country club. "Everything's on hold," he said, issuing instructions for her to call another supervisor. "There's a possibility we'll be open this afternoon, but I won't know until around noontime. I might just have the noontime person come in today. I'll get in touch with them as soon as I can. And please call the snack bar people . . . Thank you."

  Ron snapped the phone shut and put it back in his jacket pocket. He plopped into a chair on the porch of the Pumpkin Shack as the rain dripped steadily from the eaves and splashed on the concrete. A hummingbird with purple wings and streaks of luminescent green flitted up to a feeder Ron had mounted at t
he edge of the porch. He liked watching the hummingbirds. But now he was thinking about work, getting peeved. "Lifeguards are the most notorious whiners to manage," he groused. "Most of them are kids . . . Talk about whine."

  One lifeguard had recently complained about her shift being canceled at the last minute because of the rain. She didn't get paid for the day, and she also hadn't been able to make other plans. That kind of attitude steamed Ron. He didn't control the weather. "The lifeguards want to come in and sit inside the cabana and bullshit and get paid," he said. "No way. I'm not paying people eleven dollars an hour just to sit around. My boss judges me by the numbers. He looks at the rain gauge just like I do. He'd be saying, 'What's going on here? We had fifteen rain days and our labor costs are still the same as last year?' "

  Ron's phone rang. "Hello? Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Then have those two come in and have everybody else on hold. And then we'll go from there. Thank you."

  Ron pocketed the phone again and continued his rant. "They're kids. They're like motion-activated. They don't do nuthin' until you walk up on 'em. It's just sad."

  He cast another worried glance at the rain. The ground was too muddy to finish burying vines. "Part of me is saying, 'Gee, I don't have to do four hours' worth of work today.' But now I'll have to be out there no later than six A.M. tomorrow because those vines have to be buried. I have to be in to work by eleven A.M. There's four hours of work, and then it takes me an hour to get cleaned up and dressed and thirty-five minutes to drive to work. If I had a nine-to-five kind of job, I could do it when I got home. But"—he shrugged—"You work when you can."

  Dick had already left to go to the country club early that morning. He had a part-time job there that summer, three days a week, mowing grass on the golf course. The greens had to be mowed rain or shine. Dick had a system: He cut left to right on Wednesday, right to left on Thursday, and then on Friday, when he had to double-cut, because the greens wouldn't be cut again until Mon day, he made one round left to right, and then went over the course right to left.

  "I have six holes that I cut. And it takes me four hours," Dick explained. "That ain't bad. That's taking my time to make sure it's done right." Even with a menial task like mowing, Dick took pride in his work. "I look at it as a personal thing," he said. "You always want to do the best job you can. It's only mowing. But it's not just mowing. If you don't do it right, it looks like hell."

  With his dad at work, Ron needed to feed the animals. He walked into the big red barn and greeted the goats, who were sticking their heads through the slatted gates of their pens, bleating for food. "I'm careful not to feed them too much. My father always overfeeds them," Ron said. He fussed like that about his dad a lot, but more from affection than real annoyance. Except he was getting more worried about his dad's health. "He's smoking like a chimney. He's a massive accident waiting to happen. He doesn't care. You can't talk to him about it. None of us are perfect, but he's like me, a tad on the stubborn side."

  Ron emerged from the barn and squinted up at the sky. The rain had lightened to a spitty mist. It was time to pollinate while he could. He had harvested a bunch of male flowers the night before and left them in a plastic cup of water in the Pumpkin Shack. The males, too, had to be protected from insects before they opened. Now he grabbed a fistful of the flowers and headed back out to the patch. It would be quick work once he got started.

  Ron had pollinated hundreds of females in his pumpkin-growing career, and had developed his own particular way of doing it. With a bouquet of male flowers in one hand, he advanced slowly down a slippery-wet plank toward his target. He laid out his board and kneeled down over the female, slipping the Ziplock bag off the bloom like a bridegroom lifting a veil. It was now a little after 8 A.M., and the petals were all neatly folded back, the looped lobes of the stigma in open view. Ron liked the looks of this one. He liked his pumpkins to be shaped like eggs, not Ping-Pong balls. He believed the lower, longer pumpkins had a smaller seed cavity and would weigh more when mature.

  He stripped the petals off one of the male flowers to expose its pollen-laden stamen. Then he gently pushed the female's petals open wider and poised the stamen over the stigma. Many growers use the exposed stamen like a paint brush, gently rubbing its pollen off onto the female's lobes with quick, efficient strokes. But Ron preferred to flick his finger against the stem of the male, knocking the pollen off so that it rained down onto the stigma. "I don't like to mash pollen grains," he said. "I like to get that nice, gentle pollen flying down on there." Tap tap. He flicked away for a few seconds and then picked up a second male to repeat the process. "I think more pollen contributes to a higher seed count," he explained. Tap tap tap.

  The stigma by this time was blanketed thickly in pollen grains. But Ron kept flicking. "I don't want to miss anything," he said. "I make sure I do a real thorough job. I try to get every last bit of pollen. I've had them sometimes looking like Shake 'n Bake on a chicken in there."

  Finally satisfied, Ron stood up. The stripped petals of the male flowers lay in a pile next to the plant, a bright-orange splash in the black mud. So much thinking and planning and worry and toil and sweat had led up to that moment. And now there was nothing to do but wait. If fertilization fails, then the pumpkin will wither and fall off, and another pumpkin will have to be pollinated elsewhere on the vine. If fertilization is successful, the bloom will shrivel, but the baby pumpkin will begin to swell and slowly lean over to lay down in the soil, where it will make its bed for the duration of the season.

  Ron moved on to the next female. Females flowers with their baby pumpkins emerge at the tip of the growing vine, along with new leaves and side vines. So each new segment of the vine will usually bring another female. By the time he and his dad were finished pollinating for the season, each plant would have two or three baby pumpkins growing on it. And then they'd have to choose which ones to keep. That could be a torturous guessing game. The first pumpkins pollinated would have a head start on the later ones, but they would be on smaller plants. Ron liked his competition pumpkins to be set 12 to 14 feet out on the vine— what he called the "golden zone." And that might not happen until the second or third pumpkin was pollinated.

  Ron believed that pollinating a pumpkin on a bigger plant would provide a stronger growth engine. It also would allow the side vines more time to finish growing. He wanted the plant's energy to go into its fruit, not into its leaves. "We're growing pumpkins, not salad," he'd say.

  Already, Ron was calculating which newly pollinated pumpkins were in better position. He stood at the edge of the garden and looked back at the bloom he'd just finished pollinating. He'd fertilized another pumpkin on the same plant just a couple days before. "I would rather have this one, growing to the outside over there," he said, pointing to the pumpkin pollinated earlier. He lifted his finger, jabbed it in the air, and counted its nine side vines. "But if this one was the one," he pointed to the female he'd just pollinated, "I'd have ten to eleven side vines."

  Ron moved down the garden, appraising each plant. He stopped to look at another recently pollinated pumpkin. "If that one underneath the chair takes, I'm going to keep it. You always want farther out, and that one's going to be about fourteen feet."

  He spotted a female flower about to bloom in a prime spot on another plant. "That's a good sign. That's about four days away from being ready to pollinate. I've got a good shot there of getting one set within the golden zone."

  Ron picked up his board and dragged it to the end of the garden. He was already thinking ahead a couple weeks to when all the pumpkins were pollinated, all the side vines were finished growing, and the work would get a bit easier. But the weather had to ease up first. With the pumpkins growing so fast now, and everything so wet, conditions were ripe for disease. Ron wasn't sure he could stomach another season of losing his best pumpkins to rot.

  "Granted, you're always going to lose a pumpkin or two. But you know what? Me and my father deserve a little luck," he said. "Sometimes that's a
ll it is. It just comes down to luck. And we deserve a little luck too." Ron grew pensive, thinking about their long history of misfortune. He plodded back toward the house, staring down at his boots squishing through the wet grass.

  "Well," he said, "I guess it's like Clint Eastwood said in the Un-forgiven. 'Deservin's got nothing to do with it.' All you can really ask for is opportunity. We've got ten plants out there and five of them are from the best seed in the world. You can't get any better than that."

  10

  Choices

  BY THE MIDDLE of July, New England was finally enjoying some bright, sunny weather. Temperatures had crawled into the 90s several days, and pumpkin growers were beginning to think fondly on those cool, cloudy weeks of rain. After all those gray days, the sun was a shock to the plants, which reacted much the way humans do when a light is suddenly flipped on in a dark room. Many were getting sunburned, their young leaves crisping under the sun's harsh rays.

  The question consuming New England growers now was how much they should water their plants, and when, and how. Sprinkle on top? Drip hoses in the ground? By hand, underneath the leaves? The pumpkins' massive root systems sucked hundreds of gallons of water each week, and could turn wet topsoil into dry, crumbly dirt in 24 hours with the help of a little sun.

  But the 18 inches of rainfall they'd had in two months hadn't disappeared completely. The water table was high, keeping the dirt moist deep down. Much of the moisture was still in the air, cranking up the humidity to choking levels and steaming up the pumpkin patches. It made the work of growing even hotter and dirtier.