Backyard Giants Page 14

  Early Saturday morning, Dick had rolled out of bed and headed straight for the patch, wearing just a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He picked up the garden hose and began watering. He wasn't worried about anyone driving by and seeing him in his underwear. "What difference does it make? They look just like colored shorts," he pointed out. "And they're nice and thin and cool." It was going to be a big day in the pumpkin patch.

  Today Ron and Dick had to make their final choice about which pumpkins to keep on each plant. The keepers would have to be carefully lifted, still on the vine, and placed on a special piece of coated wire mesh fabric designed for use on factory conveyor belts. The material made the perfect foundation for giants to grow on—water drained right through it, and it was a tough barrier to mice and other varmints that liked to tunnel under and eat the fruit from the bottom.

  The pumpkins already were growing so fast that soon they would be too heavy to lift. Even now, it was a two-man job: Ron lifted the pumpkin a few inches off the ground, while Dick quickly slid a large piece of the fabric underneath it. Then they covered the pumpkin with a sheet. They'd decided not to build shade tents this year. Instead, they would shield the fruits' tender skins from the sun with a simple white sheet. They had borrowed the technique from other growers who found that the cloth worked just as well as the tent, and also reduced the risk of damage if a windstorm came along and blew the tents down.

  All the growers now were putting in long hours in the patch every day just to keep up with the rampant vine growth. At this point, every giant pumpkin plant had at least 10 side vines extending from each side of the main vine. During peak growth in late June and early July, those side vines might grow a foot a day. Add in the main vine, and that's 21 feet a day that need to be inspected and pruned and buried on each plant. Many of the bigger plants could have 30 or 40 side vines, and the top growers were looking after at least 3 or 4 plants. The Wallaces were growing 10. The LaRues were growing 25.

  By 8 A.M., Ron was sweating through his T-shirt as he crawled on his hands and knees across a board in the pumpkin patch, searching for stray vines that needed trimming. His faded denim shorts were dark brown in front where he had repeatedly wiped the dirt from his hands. His white socks sagged down around the ankles of his leather boots. The sun was white and hot in a cloudless blue sky. Ron wore his favorite red-and-blue Buffalo Bills baseball cap, the one he'd had since he was 11, to shield his eyes from the glaring sun.

  The Wallace pumpkins lead the lineup at the October weigh-off in Warren, Rhode Island: Ron's entry on the left, Mrs. Calabash on the right

  A typical summer afternoon: Ron Wallace laces on his homemade garden-walking shoes—designed to prevent compression of the soft dirt—and straps on his backpack sprayer to administer a dose of "compost tea" fertilizer to the Wallace patch.

  By July 5, the rampant growth of the pumpkin plant has been carefully pruned into a "Christmas tree" pattern to maximize the energy pouring into the growing pumpkins.

  With the emphasis on breeding for

  ever-bigger fruit, growers develop an encyclopedic knowledge of pumpkin reproduction. Male flowers have a

  distinctive, pollen-laden stamen that

  rises from the center of the bloom.

  Female flowers have a stigma that

  receives the male's pollen and transfers

  it to the baby pumpkin growing below

  the bloom. Once fertilized, the

  pumpkin will begin to grow with

  incredible speed.

  Until the pumpkin is lifted out of the patch for competition, a grower never knows whether it's rotted from the bottom up. Here, Dick Wallace poses with the saw he used to cut up a heartbreaker in 2005.

  Scott and Shelley Palmer with their surprise 2005 New England champion.

  Jack LaRue with one of the twenty giant pumpkins he grew in 2006.

  Dave Stelts in the patch with his month-old 1068 pumpkin.

  Steve Connolly with a 1,214.5-pounder he grew in 2005. (Photo by Bill Gibson)

  Joe Jutras with his just-harvested entry

  for the 2006 Frerich's Farm weigh-off.

  Peter Rondeau with young pumpkins

  in his backyard patch in July.

  Larry and Gerry Checkon with pumpkin carver Scott Cully and his rendering of Larry's 1,469-pound 2005 world-record winner. (Photo by Marvin Meisner)

  A visit to another grower's garden is equal parts social call and reconnaissance mission. Here, New Hampshire tour attendees survey Jim Ford's twenty-pumpkin patch.

  Sherry LaRue next to her 1068 at the October weigh-off in Half Moon Bay, California.

  The Rhode Island growers work together to load Joe Jutras's pumpkin for the state weigh-off.

  Farmer Donald Salisbury pitches in with his tractor to help load the Wallaces' pumpkins for the Rhode Island weigh-off.

  Ron and Dick followed a strict schedule for fertilizing their patch with compost tea and applying pesticide and fungicide to ward off pests and disease. That meant strapping on the heavy backpack sprayer and moving slowly through the patch to thoroughly coat each plant at least once a week and usually more often. If they slacked off, it would take only a few days for a rampaging fungus or a swarm of hungry insects to damage enough leaves to create a huge hole in the plant, crippling its ability to produce enough energy to feed a giant pumpkin.

  Already, the hot weather was bringing the bugs out in force. As Ron set to work that morning, the orange and black blur of a squash vine borer moth buzzed by, swooping low over the plants and then flitting off into the woods before Ron could catch and kill it. "First squash vine borer of the year," he noted.

  "Look here!" Dick hollered from the other side of the patch. He pointed to a female squash bug creeping slowly along the top of a pumpkin leaf, leaving a neat, double-rowed trail of reddish-brown eggs behind. That was definitely not good. An infestation of squash bugs could suck the life out of a plant in a matter of days. Ron did a quick search, spotting another half-dozen bugs and several more clusters of the sesame-seed-sized eggs glued to the tops and bottoms of leaves. It was a full-fledged invasion. Ron would have to haul out the backback sprayer again that afternoon for a liberal dose of pesticide.

  The Wallace patch was nearly running out of room. The mature vines had lost their neat, triangular shape and were beginning to fill out the spaces between plants. The baby pumpkins remained hidden beneath the spreading canopy of leaves that covered the garden. The emerald ceiling hid a sanctuary beneath, where the shaded roots of the plant grew less than half an inch beneath the moist soil.

  Pollination was finished, and every plant now had one or two or three baby pumpkins growing on the main vine. Most were whitish-yellow, with smooth, polished skins, like a peeled onion.

  Some had a lovely round shape. Most were elongated, almost oval, like short, fat, albino watermelons. They varied in size, depending on when they had been pollinated. The youngest were about the size of a large lemon. The biggest, about two weeks old, were a little bigger than a basketball, and weighed about 50 to 60 pounds. But Ron and Dick hadn't begun the official measuring yet. It was still too early. The measurements at this point didn't mean much. A strong-growing baby would expand several inches every day.

  With the dirt packed deep under his fingernails, his sweat-soaked shirt clinging to his back, his knees black with mud, and every muscle in his body aching from hours of stooping and crawling, Ron had just one sustaining thought as he slaved in his pumpkin patch. After all the setbacks, after all the terrible weather in the spring, he had beautiful plants. He had healthy pumpkins. He had a shot. Maybe his best shot ever.

  Down the road from the Wallaces, Scott Palmer was in need of some help. Because of his hernia surgery, he was still barred from any strenuous activity, especially the kind of bending and lifting and reaching required for work in the pumpkin patch. Dick and Ron and Peter Rondeau had spent a recent afternoon in Scott's patch to help prune and bury the vines. Then Dick had appeared one day with the
backpack sprayer to give the Palmer plants a dose of compost tea. Scott and Shelley appreciated the help—were grateful for it—but felt guilty. The backpack sprayer was heavy. Dick was getting older, and he wasn't exactly a prime specimen of good health. But he wasn't ready to think of himself as old, even though his body was sending a different message. He'd gotten the job done, but he was red-faced and soaked in sweat when he finished. Shelley was horrified. She fussed at Scott, "Why did you let him do that?"

  "You know I can't get him to stop," Scott answered.

  "I just feel bad about it," Shelley said. "I told him, 'You're going to go home and Cathy is going to yell at you. In fact, I'm going to tell her to yell at you.' "

  But the extra dose of fertilizer had helped. Scott's plants had caught up. He had pollinated three pumpkins—one on the exact spot where he'd grown his prizewinning 1,443-pounder the year before. Still, things weren't going perfectly. "I've been having to water every single day. My dirt just won't hold any water. I need some more organic matter," he fretted. Scott was beginning to regret that he hadn't done more work on his soil that spring. His experiment in letting well enough alone was beginning to yield some results. And he didn't like what he was seeing.

  From the beginning, Ron hadn't liked the looks of one particular pumpkin. The female flower had what growers called "seeds in the blossom." It was a developmental defect that caused some of the teensy ovules, which should be down inside the baby pumpkin fruit, to leak up into the flower itself. Not actual seeds yet, the ovules are tiny white dots, not much bigger than grains of salt. As giant pumpkins became more heavily inbred—siblings crossed with siblings, mothers and fathers crossed with children—growers had been noticing more seeds showing up in the blossoms every year.

  The question they endlessly debated was, did it matter? Some felt that, absent some obvious deformity, a few seeds in the blossom didn't make any difference. Others felt strongly that any defect in the bloom would result in a defect in the growing pumpkin, making it stunted or deformed, or more likely to crack halfway through the season.

  Ron wasn't sure what to think. He'd gone ahead and pollinated the pumpkin even after he'd noticed a few seeds in the blossom. Everything else about the baby fruit had been perfect—its location on the main vine, its shape, its growth rate—and it had been pollinated at the perfect time during that first week in July. But as always, he'd pollinated a couple more pumpkins on the same plant as insurance. Now he had to decide which one to keep. This was one of competitive growers' most agonizing decisions of the season, which pumpkins to cull and which one to keep?

  Often, there were two or three pumpkins on each plant that had good potential, and any one of them might produce a big pumpkin. But not every one would have the potential to be a champion. So many things needed to work together in perfect synchronicity to grow a world-record pumpkin. The fruit needed to be in the right position on the vine to pull the most energy from the plant. It had to be the right shape—some growers believed oval shapes were able to hold up better during the explosive August growth phase, while rounder pumpkins were prone to splitting midway through the season. It had to be growing fast, and it had to be free from deformities (though often those wouldn't show up for several more weeks). And it had to have been pollinated early enough to give it time to put on a world-class weight by harvest time.

  When it came to culling time, growers could torture themselves over which pumpkin to keep and which to cut loose. They wanted as much time as possible to evaluate the pumpkins to make the best choice, but for every day the plant had to support more than one pumpkin, the growth of the eventual keeper was slowed. Delaying the cull too long would make it less likely that a pumpkin would make it over 400 pounds by the end of July. Yet every time growers cut a reject off the vine, they were plagued by the thought, "Did I just send the future world record to the compost pile?"

  Ron had been wavering for days, and the seeds-in-the-blossom pumpkin was already the size of a human head. Another pumpkin pollinated several days later on the same plant was only the size of a baseball. Keeping the first one was tempting, and Ron hadn't been able to bring himself to cut it off yet. Every day he delayed, though, was stealing energy from the baseball-sized pumpkin on the vine. It would continue to grow slowly as long as the first pumpkin was sucking up all the juice. Today was the day he had to decide.

  "It's either one of those two," said Dick. "Just make the decision so it can grow." Dick had changed into a bright-orange T-shirt and gray sweatpants cut off below the knee. He wore a yellow straw cowboy hat with the brim turned up on the sides. His face was rosy from the hot sun and humidity.

  "Well, take a look," said Ron, calling his father over to inspect both pumpkins. Dick tottered out on the narrow board behind Ron and crouched down in the leaves, his hands braced on his knees. The seeds-in-the-blossom pumpkin was a beauty: a butter yellow, perfectly symmetrical sphere. He looked closely at the blossom end of the pumpkin, opposite the stem, where the seeds had appeared. There was nothing unusual that he could see. "We could make this plant a test to see what really happens," suggested Dick. "We've got nine others, Ronnie, right?"

  Ron still wavered. He stood up and stared at the plant, debating out loud. "You've got this one twelve foot out, and you're about sixteen foot there with the other one, but it had a real late start . . . We could always just leave it for another day. Keep an eye on it until tomorrow maybe."

  "You know what, Ronnie, cut the freakin' thing. It's not like we don't have anything else," urged Dick.

  That did it. Without another word, Ron bent down with his knife and sliced off the bigger seeds-in-the-blossom pumpkin, then stood up holding it by its stem, executioner style, to give it one last appraising look. "Pumpkin, we hardly knew ye," Ron said, then tossed it to the side of the patch. Now that the deed was done, there was no use second-guessing himself about it. "What are you going to do? You've got to take some risk. That thing could've split on me up around seven hundred or eight hundred pounds, and then I'd be saying, 'Shit, I should have taken it off.' I'd rather take my chances with the baseball."

  Dick picked up a shovel and walked over to the cast-off pumpkin. He lifted the shovel blade and jammed it down, cleaving the smooth-skinned orb in half. Maybe, he thought, a pumpkin autopsy would reveal the mystery of the seeds in the blossom. Dick bent down to examine it. Inside was a solid mass of pale-yellow pulp, ringed by the denser, darker border of the rind. Filmy white seeds had begun forming in the pulp, which would begin to hollow out as the pumpkin grew, eventually becoming the stringy, slimy stuff so well known to jack-o'-lantern carvers. Dick aligned the spot on the blossom where the seeds had appeared with the inside of the dissected pumpkin. There was an odd, tubelike growth coming out of the rind at that point. Was that related to the seeds in the blossom? Was it a potential defect? Dick showed Ron the odd growth. "Look at this," Dick said. "See that? That was a split waiting to happen."

  "That would have made for a weak point later," Ron agreed.

  Dick studied the pumpkin some more. "Smells great," he said, breathing in the sweet, cantaloupey smell of the opened fruit. He turned half of the pumpkin over in his hands. A dirt-blackened line accented the stubs of his closely bitten fingernails. "Lots of seeds, Ronnie. There would have been lots of seeds in this one." A tinge of regret crept into his voice.

  "You think it would have made it?" Ron asked, the second thoughts contagious.

  "Look at how thick it is at the blossom end," Dick said.

  "Maybe this one would have been extra heavy. Maybe . . . " But he snapped himself out of it. "Awww, that's all right," he said. "No big deal." He heaved the two halves of the baby pumpkin over the fence to the edge of the woods. It was deer food now.

  As July wore on, temperatures continued to tick up across the nation. The heat, especially on the East Coast, began to generate headlines as air conditioners were cranked up and electricity demand spiked through the roof. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg turned off lights at City
Hall; power customers across the East Coast set new consumption records. By Tuesday, July 18, the Associated Press reported that the heat had killed 12 people around the country.

  The pumpkin plants were wilting in the afternoon heat and the sun was literally cooking tender new leaves. Anyone who hadn't yet successfully pollinated a pumpkin was out of luck. Some desperate growers tried packing their baby pumpkins in ice, but they still aborted within a few days because of the heat stress on the plants.

  Relief finally arrived July 18 for the Northeast, though not the kind of relief the pumpkin growers wanted. A cool front descended from the north, sliding in under the warm air and wreaking havoc in the atmosphere. Thunderstorms began boiling up in New England, lighting up the National Weather Service's Doppler radar. About 9:30 P.M., the weather agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning for Rhode Island. A major storm was getting ready to cut right through the center of the state, and forecasters were sounding the alarm for nickel-sized hail and winds gusting up to 70 mph.

  Tuesdays were Ron's day off, but he'd still rolled out of bed at 5:30 A.M. and was in the patch by 6 A.M. to beat the heat. He spent the next two and a half hours trimming and burying vines and inspecting plants and pumpkins. Things were easier than before. "Two days ago it was four hours," he said. "Next time it might only be two hours. It's getting better. We're getting most of the work behind us now." Temperatures had risen to a miserable 95 that afternoon, but everyone was focused on the cool front due to arrive that evening. Ron watched the 6 P.M. television news, which warned of a few thundershowers as the front moved through. Nothing to really worry about. But a few hours later, as he was puttering around his house, he heard the big-screen television in his den start beeping with an emergency alert signal. He went in to look and saw a message streaming across the bottom of the screen, warning of the approach of a violent thunderstorm with winds that already had begun toppling trees and blowing down power lines across New England. It was almost 9:45 P.M. and the fire-red splotches on the radar showed the storm hovering on the western edge of Coventry, near the Wallace house. "Holy crap," Ron thought. "We're going to be right in the path of the storm. If we get this, we're all done."