Backyard Giants Page 16
Giant pumpkins are warped and lumpy objects, though. Some are very tall and narrow, while others are flat and wide. Odd bulges and dips and curves can make a circumference at any given point almost meaningless. So for better accuracy, growers take two other measurements and add them to the circumference. Growers take a second measurement by running the measuring tape laterally over the top of the pumpkin, dropping it straight down to the ground on either side. The pumpkin is then measured the same way back to front, from the ground, over the stem, over the top, and back over the blossom end to the ground. Growers refer to this process as "taping." The three measurements added together are called the over-the-top measurement, or OTT.
Dick made a brief note of some of the 20-day measurements at the Wallace patch:
500 Wallace x 1173 Macari—195" OTT = 1671b. (could surprise.)
1068 Wallacex887 Orr—185" = 145 lbs.?
1228 Jutrasxi225 Jutras—192" = 160lbs.?
1068 Wallacexi225 Jutras—209" =202lbs. (world class)
1068 Wallacex 1068 Wallace—202" = i84lbs. (world class)
1068 Wallacex 1354 Checkon—214" =2i6lbs. (world class)
The Wallaces still had six days to make it to their 400- to 500pound goal at the end of the month. Giant pumpkins at this point should be growing 25 to 30 pounds a day. The 500 Wallace, for instance, had been the first pumpkin pollinated, on July 1. On its 20-day birthday, July 21, it weighed 167 pounds. If the pumpkin gained an average of 25 pounds every day, it should weigh almost 420 pounds by the end of the month.
"It's a fantastic start," Dick said hopefully. But every grower knows that at this point, it's only a start. "All of these are better than the twenty-day measurements of our two largest pumpkins last year," Dick noted. "But that's all it means."
The grim odds of giant pumpkins dictated that by the end of the season, more than half the fruit that had started out so beautifully would be in the compost pile, either split open or taken down by disease. Last year the Wallaces had ended up with only two out of the eight they started, and neither of those two were competitive. Joe Jutras had wound up with just one competitive pumpkin out of eight he'd started. Peter Rondeau lost three of his four.
The Wallaces' numbers this year were ahead of most of the other growers in the club. But giant pumpkins can slow down or speed up unpredictably. "So what if somebody's got a pumpkin forty pounds heavier than yours right now?" Joe Jutras noted. "You can make up forty pounds in one day."
The toughest part for the growers was controlling the impulse to measure the pumpkins constantly. It was hard to resist when so much was riding on how fast the pumpkins were growing. For pumpkin growers, who already have proven their compulsive credentials, measuring the pumpkins could become an obsession of its own. Sitting in their houses, they can almost sense the pumpkins expanding in the patch. They think about it, wonder about it. They need to know. How much? How fast?
It's a weakness, especially, of newer growers, whose hopes have not yet been tempered by years of disappointment. Peter Rondeau admits he's been carried away by this enthusiasm more than once. He unabashedly looks up to some of the other, more-veteran pumpkin growers and feels pressured to try to keep up. He was star-struck at the growers' conference in Niagara Falls that March—his first year to go. He was one of the few growers to religiously attend every conference session. Sitting at the table with the Rhode Island gang was, he said, "like sitting in the dugout with the Boston Red Sox." Everywhere he looked, there was pumpkin royalty, world-record holders and names he knew by the pedigree of their seeds—Bobier and Daletas and LaRue. "We go out to eat for lunch, and Jack LaRue is sitting to my left and I'm talking to this guy like I knew him all my life . . . and he's the guy who grew the 1420, and it's like, 'Wow. These are normal people.' "
The summer before, Peter recalled, Dick Wallace had brought Joe Pukos, another of the hobby's great names, over to Peter's for a visit. "I was like, 'Clean the house! Clean the house!' My wife said, 'What's the matter?' and I said, 'It's Joe Pukos, it's Joe Pukos!' I'm running around like a nut. He's in the driveway and I'm in the backyard working like mad—gotta prune!"
So it was no surprise that Peter fell into the obsessive-measuring trap. In 2005, he'd measured his pumpkins at least once a day, and sometimes twice, meticulously recording every inch in his growing diary. When the pumpkins got bigger, it was difficult to reach all the way around it to get an accurate measurement, so Peter recruited his 14-year-old daughter, Abbey, to help him. By then, Peter's family knew it could get ugly if the pumpkin wasn't growing as fast as he hoped. "You have these expectations," Peter explained. "And then when they're not met, you're kind of mad. You're angry. You get in a bad mood. It kind of drives you nuts."
Peter's daughter quickly figured out that if she slipped her fingers under the measuring tape on the other side of the pumpkin where her father couldn't see, she could add an inch or two to the total, and her dad would come away happy. So whenever it looked like the pumpkin might not be growing fast enough, Abbey pulled her little trick. Just a couple of extra inches and daddy smiled. It worked like a charm.
By the end of the season, though, the numbers weren't adding up, and Abbey had to confess. It was a double gut-punch to Peter. He had to accept that his pumpkin hadn't grown as much as he thought it had, and that was painful. But what was worse was the realization of how much his pumpkin-driven mood swings had been affecting his family. He was ashamed of himself. So this year, Peter had vowed he wouldn't obsess over measuring. "That's how your sanity goes down the tubes," he said. He was determined to restrain himself. He would, of course, check on his pumpkins every day, watch them grow, but he had decided to measure them only on day 10, day 20, and then every five days after that during the peak growing period.
"I'm lowering my expectations this year," Peter said. Or, at least, he was trying to keep them under control. He felt a little like the slacker of the Rhode Island group. He was hanging with a 1,300- to 1,400-pound crowd when his biggest pumpkin last year had been only 1,100 pounds. "I've got a lot I'm going up against," he said. He felt the pressure. He was the guy coming up from behind. But by the end of July, he had two really big pumpkins, including a 1068, growing in his backyard. Growing really fast. He wondered if this might be his year.
Through most of July, the storms had boiled up, blown over, and passed by the Southern New England growers without inflicting any serious damage. The men were marveling at their good fortune right up until Friday, July 28. Joe Jutras had finished up his day at his woodworking shop, come home, eaten dinner, and headed straight out to the patch to tend to his plants. As he waded carefully through the green sea of leaves, examining vines and snipping off unwanted new growth, the skies darkened overhead and the wind picked up slightly. The breeze felt good. It had been so hot and humid that a little thunderstorm would be a relief.
When the rain began to fall, he headed up to the house. He and Sue stood in the shelter of the open garage looking out over the backyard, watching the rain come down in swirling, silvery sheets. The skies had turned even darker, the winds had picked up, and now Joe was beginning to feel a little anxious about his plants. The temperature had been a balmy 90 degrees, but had plunged at least 20 degrees in a few minutes, making the wind-driven rain feel suddenly cold against their skin.
Joe never figured out exactly what it was—a downdraft? A microburst?—but it was a ferocious wind that swirled around and over the house, churning a path through the rain, bending trees, scattering the lawn chairs on the back deck, and then sweeping across the lawn to the pumpkin patch. In an instant, the pumpkin leaves were smashed flat to the ground in a wide swathe cutting across the garden.
"It came through like a freight train," Joe said. "It was like an elephant stomping on the plants. I've never seen anything like that." His heart sank as he watched part of the deer fence surrounding his patch blow over on top of the plants and shred leaves as it flailed in the wind. He threw on his rain jacket and ran out to the garden,
trying to pull the fence off the plants before it did more damage. Then, almost as quickly as it began, the storm passed. The winds died down and the rain quit.
About half an inch of rain had fallen in 20 minutes, Joe estimated. He surveyed his smashed garden. At least 500 pumpkin leaves were lying against the ground, many with broken stems. Three long side vines on one of his most-prized plants had snapped and uprooted. The vines couldn't be saved. Neither could many of the leaves. There wasn't much Joe could do, so he ran back in the house and began dialing up the other Rhode Island pumpkin growers to see how they had fared. The storm had passed harmlessly over everyone else. Only Joe had suffered damage.
Saturday morning, Dick Wallace and Peter Rondeau showed up early to help Joe mend as much of the damage as they could. Joe had gone out that morning and bought dozens of three-foot-long sticks of bamboo at a local Lowe's hardware store. Most of the leaves were a lost cause—he trimmed about 300 whose hollow stems had snapped when the wind blew them over. But another couple hundred leaves looked salvageable. The stalks had bent over and creased, but hadn't broken. Joe figured he could use the bamboo sticks to splint the stems and get them standing back upright until they could heal themselves.
So for hours that morning, the three men worked, moving from leaf to leaf, poking the bamboo down into the dirt next to the vine, then using duct tape to straighten the leaf stem and secure it to the stick. Peter and Joe crouched in the dirt until their knees creaked with the strain and their backs ached from stooping over. It was hot, sweaty, dirty work under a blistering sun that was quickly turning the day into another scorcher. Dick brought his usual light touch to the job, tearing off short strips of tape and sticking them to his belly so that Joe and Pete could reach up and grab one whenever they needed it—the human tape dispenser.
On July 23, Steve Connolly's 1068 pumpkin had weighed an estimated 330 pounds. The next-best pumpkin in his patch weighed only 243 pounds, even though it was five days older. At the end of July, Steve measured again. At just 32 days old, his 1068 was now more than 600 pounds. That was well over the 400- to 500-pound benchmark the Wallaces were shooting for. Steve had never had a pumpkin that had grown anywhere near that fast. It was, without doubt, a world-record pace. And all of August, the peak growing period, loomed ahead. Steve thought the 1068 would easily be able to put on another 1,000 pounds by the end of September. And that would give him a 1,600-pound pumpkin at weigh-off time.
11
Grow 'em Big
LARRY CHECKON'S PALE FEET padded silently across the grass as he headed out of the house, around the back of the garage, and down to pumpkin patch No. i. His toes gripped the blades of grass as his feet rose and fell, his footprints quickly disappearing in the resilient sod. There was nothing, except maybe a slight low trail in the green grass, to betray how often Larry had walked this path.
Every summer day he woke up with first light, jumped from bed, put on a pot of coffee, and headed out to see how his garden had fared through the night. This morning, on the way to the pumpkins, Larry stopped first at another part of the garden, where a tall corn plant was leaning slightly to one side. Using his bare foot as a hoe, he scooped up some dirt, piled it around the base of the plant, and then gently tamped it down to straighten up the plant and give it more support. Bare feet were Larry's antennae in the garden. Just by walking around, he could sense how warm or cool the dirt was and whether the patch needed water. He could even feel the earthworms squirming underfoot in the fresh-tilled soil. Standing on the edge of the garden, he stretched out a foot and used his toes to pluck a weed. "You can do a lot with toes," he said.
It was a clear morning, the last weekend in July, and a cool mist still rested lightly across the wooded hills surrounding the Check-ons' 2.5-acre homestead. This was not just a piece of property here on the outskirts of Spangler, Pennsylvania; this was a piece of Larry's soul.
The land, tucked into a valley in northwestern Pennsylvania, had been in his family more than ioo years. Larry had lived there all his life. He stayed on after his mother died when he was 19 years old. And when he married, his wife moved in and together they cared for Larry's aging father, George, until he died. George Checkon had lived a long, productive life on that land. He was a coal miner for 37 years, breathing in the black dust and straining to see through the darkness underground. But when he'd come home, he'd work in the sunlight, in the garden, growing things. When Larry got older, Larry grew things too.
Now there were gardens carved out all across the Checkon backyard, which stretched around in an L shape behind the house. In these gardens Larry grew onions and red potatoes and asparagus and sweet corn, tomatoes and broccoli and cauliflower and horseradish, carrots and rosemary and peppers. The plants were huge, healthy, and lush, growing in neatly tended rows. Flowers bloomed along the edges of the gardens. Larry's dad had liked to grow flowers around the vegetable patch, and they still popped up faithfully year after year. "Every time I go to pull one, I can hear him say, 'Don't pull that out.' So I leave it," Larry said. "You know, he's been gone for three years now, but I still talk to him every day. So I just leave a few poppies for him."
If giant pumpkins went to heaven, it would be a place like this, where every molecule of air invited things to grow. Small wonder, then, that the Checkons had won two world titles in the past seven years. Larry and his wife, Gerry, were the only husband-and-wife team ever to have achieved the singular and slightly obnoxious feat of growing one world-record pumpkin each. Gerry had set her record with the first pumpkin she ever grew, a 1,3 n-pounder in 1999. Larry was now the reigning world champion for his 1,469-pound pumpkin. The his-and-her titles made them the indisputable king and queen of the giant-pumpkin world. But the twin triumph hadn't dulled their desire to win one whit. "After growing two world records here, I guess anything else would just be gravy," he acknowledged. "But we would like to break the fifteen-hundred-pound mark."
Larry and Gerry, both 54 years old, were born the same year in the same town and graduated from the same high school together, but they married later in life, in 1993. It was Gerry's second marriage and Larry's first, and they'd found an easy equilibrium together. Gerry worked as the marketing coordinator for a county-owned long-term care facility for the elderly, and Larry was an electronics technician, building and repairing radios for fire trucks, police cars, and other commercial vehicles.
Originally, Larry's father had been the giant-pumpkin grower. In 1997, he was 87 years old and growing frail. He knew it was the last year he'd be able to grow pumpkins, and he wanted to give it everything he had. So it was a very big deal when he produced his biggest pumpkin ever: 700 pounds. The pumpkin, unfortunately, cracked open before they could get it to the weigh-off. But according to competition rules in years past, that didn't matter. Larry helped his dad seal up the crack with some caulking putty, and, to make it look nicer, they touched it up with a little orange paint.
When they got to the weigh-off in Altoona, about 30 miles away, George's pumpkin was weighed and it looked like he would win second place and $500. "He was so excited," Larry recalled. But then the judges came over and told him he was disqualified. The Pennsylvania club running the weigh-off had joined the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth that year and was following new GPC rules that disqualified damaged pumpkins. Larry's father was crushed. Larry was mad. Larry was very mad. "Something just sort of snapped in me," he said. "I told Gerry right on the spot, I said, 'Next year I'm going to grow a pumpkin and I'm going to come down here and win this thing.' "
The next morning at 6 A.M., Larry grabbed a shovel from the garage and walked out into the middle of the lawn and started digging. He worked through the day until it was dark, and then he kept on working late into the night. Gerry asked him, "How can you see anything out there in the dark?" And Larry answered, "I can see perfect. There's a streetlight out front and a full moon in the sky."
It took him two weeks to finish digging and tilling the new patch. And then he spent the whole winter rese
arching how to grow giant pumpkins. Come springtime, he got a soil test and added in some more compost and manure. His father thought he'd gone nuts. But Larry told Gerry, "If I'm going to do this, I might as well do it right." The next fall, Larry took an 815-pound pumpkin to Altoona and won first place in the weigh-off.
George Checkon was a stern man, not one for showing emotion. "But I saw tears in his eyes that day," said Gerry. "That was the happiest I ever saw Dad."
Until then, Gerry had always left the gardening to Larry. But there was something about the fun of watching those giants grow, and the thrill of the competition, that drew her in. She told Larry she'd like to try growing a giant pumpkin the next year. So two giant pumpkins swelled in the Checkon patch in 1999. There was Gerry's, named Moonie because of its round shape and white color, and there was Larry's, named Womper.
Womper zoomed to over 1,000 pounds by the middle of August with no sign of slowing down. The current world record was 1,092 pounds. If his pumpkin would just hold together until the weigh-off, he would have a new record in his hands. Larry got grower's fever: sleepless nights, churning stomach. He checked on the pumpkin as soon as his eyes opened every morning. "It gets to the point where you're half afraid to look," he said.
Sure enough, one morning in the third week of August, Larry saw a black line running across the skin of his pumpkin. He picked up a piece of straw and poked at it. It went in. He pushed the straw in slowly, an inch at a time. It went all the way through the shell. His world-record contender had split. Larry was devastated. "You put all that work into it. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of time, and all at once, it's over. All that effort and work is for nothing. Plus, this pumpkin wasn't just a pumpkin; it was a world record for sure," said Larry. "It just made me sick. I was sick for a whole week."