Backyard Giants Read online

  August was the peak time for growing and the peak time for blowing. Pumpkins literally cracked under the strain of putting on 30 to 50 pounds a day while adjusting to changes in temperature and water. Growers ventured into their patches each morning with their hearts in their throats, checking over their pumpkins like paramedics examining an accident victim. Every grower knew the odds—more than half wouldn't make it through the season. But every grower hoped the bad luck would pass him by.

  As the pumpkins popped, growers retreated to BigPumpkins.com to lick their wounds. "This very morning she blew a dime-sized hole at a segment dead center on the Dill ring," wrote "docgipe" of Mountoursville, Pennsylvania. "Dadgum it anyhow . . . I finally had a good grow going."

  "We now have a split into the cavity on our 5601b LaRue," said "Creekside" of Santa Cruz, California.

  "My 898 gave way today to a small % inch split," said "Pennsylvania Rock."

  Matt, of New Hampshire, posted a disconsolate note in his grower's diary: "Things look bleak. I am just about done. The 1081 has a deep stem split and the 953 has slowed to a crawl. It has been a very unpleasant season for me and I am quite certain that I will be taking next year off in favor of a vacation."

  On August 12, Don Young of Des Moines, Iowa, had proudly recorded the championship pace of his 1068 in his grower's diary: "1068 day 47: 1,002 pounds."

  On August 20, he reported, "1068 split in sag line = real sad day."

  Ron Wallace was in his element. With a long white apron snugged around his waist, he hovered over a six-foot-long gas grill set up outside the Pumpkin Shack, adding water to a simmering pot, giving something in a pan a stir, peeking under a tinfoil lid to check the progress of another dish warming on the burner. Behind him, a hubbub of voices arose as growers arrived with their families and the booze and banter began to flow. The Wallaces were hosting the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers' summer picnic. Ron had scaled the usual patch tour back to a simple social gathering this year as part of his campaign to reduce his workload.

  Just as the guests began to arrive for the 2 P.M. picnic, though, black clouds darkened the horizon. Within a few minutes, the wind picked up, whipping the white tablecloths off the picnic tables, and then the skies opened and the rain poured down. The picnic guests huddled under the porch and inside the Pumpkin Shack waiting for the storm to pass. Water gushed from the sky in a downpour so heavy it was difficult to see 10 feet beyond the edge of the porch. The storm moved fast, passing by in only 15 minutes. The tables and chairs were dried off, and Ron went back to his cooking as the guests continued to arrive. By now everyone was used to the afternoon thunderstorms.

  As he manned the grill, Ron nursed a frozen mudslide, a potent concoction of Kahlua and Baileys Irish Cream. Children played in a red and blue bounce-house set up on the lawn, and guests wandered back and forth across the wet grass from the Pumpkin Shack to the pumpkin patch. The Wallace plants looked good. Their pumpkins look good. But word of the impressive fruit seen at the previous day's New Hampshire patch tour already had reached Ron, stirring up his competitive juices. When a guest commented on how good the Wallace pumpkins looked, Ron couldn't resist a little chest-puffing. "That'll give those fellas in New Hampshire a run for their money, eh?" he said. But he immediately dropped the bluster. "Nawwww, just kidding. You know I'm just kidding," he said.

  Ron and his dad were both working hard to contain their excitement. This was partly out of superstition—Ron was afraid that bragging at this point would put the jinx on him for sure. But it was also to protect their sanity. If they thought they had a potential world-record pumpkin out there, if they thought they really had a shot, they probably wouldn't be able to sleep again until the October 7 weigh-off.

  For the picnic, Dick had put up signs in front of each pumpkin with the pollination date and the parentage, but without the estimated weights many growers displayed. Instead, Dick had scrawled names and captions for the different pumpkins. "Hard charger," he called one promising 1068. "Blockhead," he named a squarish pumpkin. The 500 Wallace, which had the same genetics as the 1068, except the mother and father were reversed, was the biggest pumpkin in the patch so far, and Dick named that one "Pap's Pride." For another 1068 that had been crossed with the 1354 Checkon seed, he scrawled, "Could be?" in a corner of the sign.

  One of the 1068s that had lost its base to the foaming slime had stopped growing shy of 500 pounds. The sign on that one said, "Deer Food. Eat me."

  Dick was having more fun than usual this year. He wasn't as tied up in knots as he usually was at this point in the season, trying to calculate and recalculate their odds of success with every shifting breeze. Maybe he'd finally learned to chill out. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe it was because he was hoping this would be Ron's year, and that took a little pressure off Pap.

  "This is the first year I've gone to bed at night and not laid there thinking about and wondering about how well the pumpkins are going to do. When we had some good ones going in years past, every night I'd lay there thinking about, 'Gee, if this thing does another thirty pounds a day, and thirty times seven is . . . and like that. But this year I don't even go out to the patch as much. When I go out there, I go out there to work. I don't go out there and keep walking around just lookin' at 'em. I don't really give a shit what anybody else has. Or if I win or don't win. I just want to get something to the scales."

  When it rained so heavily on the Southern New England club's picnic, Ron had given his dad a baleful look. "This is trouble," he'd said. Pumpkins were notorious for splitting after a burst of heavy rain prompted a burst of growth. So Ron knew what he was looking for when he went out to the patch the day after the picnic to pull the blankets off the pumpkins for their morning inspection. He looked for it, and he found it. Pap's Pride was split open at the blossom end.

  Not much—just an inch—but that's all it took. "As soon as I uncovered it, it was looking at me," Ron said. Dick grabbed a roll of duct tape and slapped a makeshift bandage across the split. That would keep out the air and stave off rot so that they could try to keep the pumpkin growing a little longer. Dick wanted to get another 100 pounds or so on the pumpkin, just to see if he could. And if the seeds had a little longer to mature, they could at least salvage the genetics. Wait too long, though, and the pumpkin could rot, ruining the seeds. It was a gamble, like everything else in the hobby.

  Either way, they'd lost another pumpkin. That made four that had run into trouble. Strangely enough, though, one of the 1068s that had lost its stump to the foaming slime was still growing strong. So really the Wallaces were down only three plants, which left them with seven good pumpkins. Out of those, they figured four were real contenders, including the stumpless wonder. And with four shots at a world record, Ron didn't want to take any more chances. If they got another heavy rainstorm, he figured he might be out in the patch cutting vines off the plants. That would reduce the water sucked up by the plant, and hopefully prevent the pumpkin from splitting. But then again, it might slow down growth for the rest of the season. "If we get a big rain, we'll have a decision to make," he said.

  Dick was disappointed at losing the 500 Wallace. "Pap's Pride was taping 1,104 and still doing 25 pounds a day," he said. "Now we'll never know what she could have been." But he was already looking on the bright side. "We have several others doing well and a possible late-season surprise from the 1068 growing second from the end on the north side of the patch. Stay tuned as the drama of September unfolds."

  When Ed Hemphill got home from the New Hampshire patch tour, he found his big pumpkin split wide open. He and Joan pulled in the driveway about midnight, and he was up at dawn the next day checking on the pumpkins. "It had split open at the top," he said. Right away, he saw where he'd gone wrong. Early in the season, he'd put a one-inch-thick piece of Styrofoam underneath the baby pumpkin to cushion it. The Styrofoam was 20 inches square, and when the pumpkin got bigger, it created a kind of overhang. Hemphill figured that had put the pumpkin shell under e
xtra strain, leading to the split. He beat himself up over it. He should have done something to brace it. Better yet, he should have put a bigger piece of Styrofoam under there from the start, or nothing at all. "So that was quite a lesson to me," he said.

  Another of his big ones had split the same weekend. After starting the season with six, he was down to just one pumpkin. But Hemphill wasn't afraid of long odds, and he liked the looks of his last chance. This pumpkin had been one of the slower growers in the patch, but it had made some impressive gains lately. And he figured it had a lot of promise. It certainly had a good pedigree. It was his 1068. The one that had arrived in the mail so unexpectedly right before planting time, the one Ron Wallace had sent on a sudden impulse of generosity.

  Dave Stelts woke up Sunday morning, August 27, feeling nervous. Another heavy thunderstorm had moved through Ohio and western Pennsylvania overnight. He checked the rain gauge—an inch and a half. No matter how much well water or city water you pump onto your pumpkin, there's nothing like a good dose of rainwater to get it growing. The rain douses the plant with nitrogen-rich, chemical-free water, supercharging the growth. With just enough water, the pumpkin gets a good growth spurt. With too much, the pumpkin could split. "They just keep drinking until they blow," said Dave. "So anything over an inch and it's pretty much hold-your-breath time for the next two or three days."

  Dave stepped into the rain-washed morning air and made his way down the hill to the patch. He scanned his plants. They looked okay. As usual, though, he could see a million things that needed doing. He began puttering around, pulling weeds, clipping vines. As he worked, Steve Razo, another top grower in the Ohio club, pulled into the driveway for a visit. As the work eases up in the patch in late summer, growers have more time to step out and survey the competition. It's a friendly ritual, with growers offering each other encouragement and exchanging advice—but also a good-natured let's-see-what-you've-got visit.

  And Dave Stelts was at the top of the to-visit list. He had six pumpkins left, and five were going strong. Even his ugliest pumpkin, one of the smaller ones he called Elephant Boy, was doing well, "getting gnarlier and uglier every day," Dave said. "He's covered in little cracks in his skin, with big ol' wartlike things growing."

  His 1068 was a comeback story. It had been the first of Dave's plants to come down with foaming stump slime. He'd had to cut off the stump and about nine feet of the main vine. But the pumpkin was still growing 15 pounds a day and estimated at 883 pounds the third week in August. Half the plant was gone, but it was, as Dave marveled, "still a machine."

  He had decided to harvest his 1068 for the Canfield Fair, an agricultural expo in northeastern Ohio. He figured it would be over 1,000 pounds by then, and he didn't expect many other 1,000 pounders to show up this early. Dave and Steve Razo made the rounds of the patch, making the morning pumpkin checks. Dave had his own system: First he checked the stem for any sign of cracking, leaking, or softness. Then he checked the blossom end. Then he scanned the sag lines along the pumpkin shell. If a pumpkin is going to go bad, those are the places it usually happens.

  They arrived at the 1068. Razo bent low over the pumpkin, running his eyes expertly over its pale, rough skin, slapping it firmly to test for the solid feeling that marks a heavyweight. Dave was yammering away about the 1068's comeback, how he thought it was a goner, how it had kept growing, amazingly, even after losing half its vine. Steve Razo interrupted him. "Uh oh," Razo said.

  Those two syllables sent a blast of adrenalin coursing through Dave Stelts's veins. His heart leaped. His brow furrowed. "What?" he asked. "What is it?"

  Razo pointed to the top of the 1068. And there it was: a tiny crack, about half an inch long and maybe an eighth of an inch wide, running perpendicular between two ribs. One glance and Dave knew it went all the way through. It was tiny, but it was black and bottomless. Just to check, he reached down and snapped off a blade of grass, then carefully threaded it through the crack. It went all the way through to the cavity. His 1068 was finished.

  Now Dave was even more nervous. He and Razo started making the rounds again, checking over each pumpkin a second time, even more carefully. Dave inspected his 1023, his second-biggest pumpkin, especially closely. This pumpkin was a beautiful, deep orange, but it had a sag line that he feared was a split waiting to happen. He ran his eyes over the sag line. Nothing. It was fine.

  Dave moved on to inspect the next pumpkin. Razo lingered. "Oh no," Razo said.

  Dave snapped. "What?"

  "This doesn't look good," said Razo, pointing to the blossom end of the 1023, where a black line had appeared. Dave had looked at the blossom end on their first rounds just 10 minutes before. But he'd only checked the sag line the second time. And in the time it took for Dave and Razo to walk around the pumpkin patch, the blossom end had split. "That's how quick they go," Dave said despondently.

  The loss of the two pumpkins in one day—within 15 minutes—hit Dave hard. Not only that, but they were two of his biggest. "The 1068,1 could have gotten over that," he said. "But the 1023 hurt bad. It hurt real bad."

  There was nothing he could do now except reconsider his weigh-off plans. He decided to harvest both split pumpkins and take them to the Canfield Fair. He was pretty sure there wouldn't be many pumpkins—if any—as big as those at the weigh-off. When he drove up with those giants, heads would turn. Hopefully, no one would notice the cracks before he got them to the scales. Not that he was thinking about cheating. He would fess up to the judges, accept their disqualification due to damage, and at least walk away with an official weight. But in the meantime, maybe he could make a few growers sweat. Just for fun.

  "I want to freak everybody out when I bring 'em in there," Dave said. "Give 'em a little shortness of breath."

  Early on Thursday morning, August 10, right before they'd left for a short trip to Oregon, Jack and Sherry LaRue went out to measure their pumpkins and found two had split overnight, one of Sherry's and one of Jack's. A cool front had moved through the day before, so they suspected the change in weather was behind the splits. They chopped up the pumpkins and heaved them down the "pumpkin chute," the hillside next to the patch where they dispatched all their rejects and failures. It was starting to get crowded at the bottom.

  "This time of year, you hate to even go out there and lift the blankets," Jack said. "They're dropping right and left."

  July's weather had been a roller coaster for the West Coast growers. They'd had a cool spell early on that dropped temperatures into the 40s at night, and two weeks later they were broiling in the high 90s. The LaRues had already had a number of casualties, including Jack's 1420 LaRue—a seed from the biggest pumpkin he ever grew—whose blossom end split the first week in August.

  It was shaping up to be the Year of the Splits. By the end of August, the LaRues had cracked seven pumpkins—all but one were blossom splits. And that got Jack to thinking. Splits along sag lines or next to the pumpkin stem were generally considered to be caused by genetic defects. But splits at the blossom end were thought to be the result of environmental factors: sudden growth spurts caused by overfertilizing or a hard rain, or a cold spell that made the shell more brittle. Jack was having second thoughts about this theory though. "We're just getting too many of them this year," he said.

  Most growers liked to keep the seeds from their biggest split pumpkins and grow them in later seasons. But Jack wondered if those splitters might be starting to contaminate the genetic pool, making ensuing generations more susceptible to cracking. If you salvaged seeds from pumpkins after they split, Jack believed, you were perpetuating survival of the weakest. "Just wash it out of the genetic pool and go with the ones that didn't split," he said. "The ones that make it, make it for a reason."

  Despite their losses, the LaRues still had more than a dozen pumpkins going strong, some measuring close to 1,000 pounds as they turned the corner to September. That was well behind the best East Coast growers, but Jack wasn't worried. East Coast pumpkins put on mo
st of their weight in August, then slowed way down in September. But the West Coast had steady growth right through September. It wasn't unheard of for pumpkins to gain 400 pounds in September and keep growing right up until the October weigh-offs.

  Sherry was down to one good pumpkin, her 1068, and it was one of the biggest in the patch. She'd given up on her 1370 Rose, christened "Problem Child," when it lost all its leaves. Her 1354 Checkon was so misshapen that she called it "BU," for Butt Ugly, and now it had some kind of white fungus growing on it.

  On August 26, Jack had lost one of his favorites, a nice orange pumpkin grown from his own seed. It was another blossom split. "I saw that thing, and I thought, 'You rotten kid.' I just wanted to haul off and kick it. That one really got to me. It was pretty depressing." On August 30, his second-biggest pumpkin split along a rib, and another of his biggest looked like it might be starting to split near a stem.

  "It's hard to understand why so many growers get caught up in this sport," Jack said. "The frustration level runs very high. Especially this season."

  13

  The Reckoning

  AUGUST ENDED, AS IT always ended, in a collision of hope and fear and envy and disappointment. Those who lost their best pumpkins to disease or splits resigned themselves for a while to the misery of defeat, and then turned their thoughts to next year. Those who had managed to hang on to a potential champion braced for a monthlong white-knuckle ride.

  Every day in September was a day of reckoning. The growers with a big one still on the vine tossed restlessly in bed at night, dreaming of what it would feel like to set a world record, wondering if it could really happen to them this time, worrying about whether their best shot would still be in one piece in the morning. They checked on their pumpkins at the first light of dawn, in the afternoon, in the fading light of evening, and sometimes in the middle of the night. They spent hours poring over growth charts, comparing their fruit to past champions, and recalculating what it would take to make it into the record books. They had survived nature's gauntlet of floods and storms and ravenous animals and insidious microbes. They'd made it through the pumpkin-popping growth spurts of August. They had come so far. They had gotten so close. But more would fall before the season was done.