Backyard Giants Read online

  A Canadian named William Warnock is given credit for introducing a new age of giant-pumpkin growing at the turn of the 20th century. In the early 1890s, Warnock worked as a sawmill machinist and carriage maker in Goderich, Ontario. He was a passionate, lifelong gardener, and he had taken an interest in growing a Mammoth variety of green pumpkin squash.

  Warnock made gardening history when he took a 365-pound pumpkin to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Then in 1900 he grew a 400-pound pumpkin, a feat so remarkable that he was invited to travel with it overseas for the Paris World's Fair, where the French government awarded him an honorary bronze medal of recognition. Warnock beat his own record once again with a 403pound pumpkin he displayed in the 18-acre Palace of Agriculture at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair—the same fair that introduced ice-cream cones and iced tea to the world. Warnock's 403-pound record would stand for an astonishing 73 years.

  In the 1970s, Pennsylvania farmer Bob Ford tinkered with the genetics of the giant squash by crossing different varieties. The result in 1976 was a 451-pound, pale-orange fruit that finally broke Warnock's record and set the world on a climb to bigger and bigger pumpkins. While Ford tinkered, a farmer in Nova Scotia was already in the grip of a lifelong obsession to produce the biggest pumpkins in the world. Howard Dill grew up in the 1930s and '40s watching his father take big pumpkins to compete at local agricultural fairs. Back then, it usually took only a 75- or 80pound pumpkin to win. Mr. Dill never outgrew his fascination with those pumpkins, and as a young man in the 1950s, he launched a campaign to crank up the weights. Each year he selected seeds from the longest, thickest, tallest pumpkins and crossbred them with each other with the idea of producing a new strain that would consistently produce fruit bigger than anything the world had yet seen.

  He also bred for color. Dill believed that the seeds his father had been using were descendants of the Warnock record-setting green squashes, and he needed those squash genes for their big and heavy traits. But he also began to select seeds from orange fruit to crossbreed the classic pumpkin color back into the giants.

  By 1977, Dill decided he had stabilized the traits he wanted in a new variety of supersized pumpkin he called Dill's Atlantic Giant. Beginning in 1979, Dill proved the potential of his seeds by growing the biggest pumpkin in the world four years in a row, and setting two new world records: with a 459-pound pumpkin in 1980 and a 493.5-pound pumpkin in 1981.

  Dill's high-profile success produced a clamor for his seeds. By then there were other big-pumpkin varieties out there, including Big Mac and Big Moon, but those produced comparative weaklings in the 100-200 pound range. Other growers were doing their own successful breeding to produce giants over 400 pounds. But it was the consistent world-record potential of the Atlantic Giant that gave it superstar appeal, and seed companies took notice. Dill began receiving orders for hundreds of pounds of his seeds. With about 1,200 seeds needed to make up each pound, he soon found himself in commercial production.

  Competitive growers seized on the Atlantic Giant Seeds and began their own amateur experiments with crossbreeding. They swapped seeds from their biggest and heaviest Atlantic Giant pumpkins with other growers. With remarkable speed, new world records followed one after the other. In 1984, Norm Gallagher of Chelan, Washington, leaped over the 500-pound mark with a new world record of 612 pounds. In 1989, the 700-pound barrier was crossed, and the following year 800 fell. It took another four years to break through 900 pounds. And then in 1996, Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville, New York, became the first in the world to grow a half-ton pumpkin, with a new world record of 1,061 pounds.

  By the 1990s, there were still a few rare giant pumpkins that could trace their ancestry directly back to William Warnock's Mammoths, but the vast majority of competitive pumpkins were descendants of Dill's Atlantic Giants. Growers used crossbreeding to reinforce the traits in their Atlantic Giants that produced the heaviest pumpkins: long, strong stems; thick fruit walls; flatter, elongated bodies. To keep track of their results, they adopted the weight-plus-grower naming system that allowed them to trace the ancestry of each seed, and to select new crosses based on the traits they wanted to emphasize. But as the pumpkins got bigger, another thing happened: They got uglier.

  Nature had not designed pumpkins for the kind of huge sizes growers began to coax out of their plants. Consider this: A fun gardening trick for children is to slip a square box over a baby field pumpkin. As the pumpkin grows inside the box, it spreads into the corners and flattens against the walls. Voila—a square pumpkin.

  That kind of malleability makes a giant pumpkin vulnerable to other shape-changing forces, such as gravity. Like a ball of Silly Putty slowly oozing flat on a table, gravity pulls on these behemoths as they grow, causing them to sag and flatten. They spread wide where they sit on the ground, drooping over on themselves like Jabba the Hutt reclining on his divan. Growth spurts produce bumps and bulges. The tiniest scratch or prick on a young pumpkin's skin can stretch into ghastly scars as the fruit expands.

  Giant pumpkins are so irregularly shaped, it is too difficult to compare size. The only definitive metric is the weight. Common sense suggests the bigger the pumpkin, the heavier it should weigh. So growers developed a measuring system to estimate the weight of the pumpkin based on its size. They quickly learned that size alone could be deceptive. Giant pumpkins could blow up to massive proportions, but if they had large, hollow seed cavities and thin walls, they could turn out to be lightweights. Before long, growers discovered that the heaviest pumpkins were the ones with more squashlike traits: gray-, green-, and blue-colored skin, with warts and bumps and rough cantaloupe netting on the shell. As growers magnified these heavier traits, the beautiful orange color that Dill had so carefully bred into his pumpkins began to be lost, and the confusion between squash and pumpkins grew.

  Growers called these mixed-up fruits "squampkins" and forged ahead. Two camps emerged. The pumpkins-are-orange crowd preferred the traditional color and took pains to breed orange into their pumpkins. But other growers cared only about growing the heaviest pumpkin possible, regardless what it looked like. Ron and Dick Wallace were in the latter camp. "I've never had a really pretty pumpkin," Dick wrote on BigPumpkins.com. "I don't pick a seed for color. I only pick for size or breeding. I'd love big and purdy, but it won't happen in the Wallace patch unless by accident. We grow strictly for competition."

  As the hobby of competitive pumpkin growing took off in the 1980s, national growing groups were organized to establish standards for the weigh-offs. The color issue became more controversial as clubs struggled to define the difference between a squash and a pumpkin. Three national organizations emerged, each with different guidelines. The largest, most influential group, the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, sought to establish percentage guidelines for color, decreeing a pumpkin had to be at least 70 percent orange. Anything less and it went into the less-prestigious squash category. This, naturally, spawned bitter disagreements over how to judge the 70 percent rule, since most pumpkins—especially squampkins—were a mottled mix of colors. Grids to count off squares of color were devised, but did little to resolve the disputes.

  The question widened the divide between East Coast and West Coast as growing clubs in California and the Pacific Northwest snubbed the GPC and its color rules. Poking fun at the whole subject, someone posted a smart-aleck question for veteran Washington state grower Jack LaRue, who dispensed advice on his club's Web site: "Dear Jack, Why are some pumpkins orange and some white and some pink and some yellow and some green?"

  To which LaRue whimsically replied:

  Some pumpkins are orange because you pollinated early in the morning of a day that ends in 'y,' using your right hand only while facing southeast, right at sunrise, thus capturing the first orange rays of the day.

  Some pumpkins are white because you pollinated well before sunrise. It is so early that the only light you have is moon light, thus the bleached out white color.

  Some pumpkins are yellow becau
se the growers are smarter than the rest of us; they do not care which way the sun comes up or goes down because they are not in the garden, they have a real life. The growers of the yellow fruit are smarter, well-rested, and much more alert for the remainder of the day than the growers with the white or orange pumpkins.

  Green pumpkins are usually grown by new growers who got a great deal on seeds through eBay. Just be patient and they may turn orange by Christmas. If you like green pumpkins, I have a few seeds for sale.

  By 2005, the question had finally been settled. Sort of. The GPC threw out its color rule and decided the heaviest fruit—whether squash or pumpkin—would be declared the overall winner of each weigh-off. Separate prizes were given for the heaviest "true green" squash and pure-orange pumpkin.

  Orange fruit, meanwhile, had begun gaining traction as growers became more successful at breeding color back into their massive squampkins without compromising weight. It was a tricky process. Seeds from orange pumpkins weren't guaranteed to grow more orange pumpkins, just as two brown-eyed parents can wind up with a blue-eyed child if each parent transmits a recessive blue-eye gene. So seeds with a reputation for reliably throwing "heavy and orange" were becoming almost as prized as the world-record winners. The orange fruit were crowd-pleasers at the local agricultural fairs, where most of the weigh-offs were held, perhaps because they actually looked like they deserved the name "pumpkins."

  Even more vexing for competitive growers than color was the 1,500 question. Late in the 2005 season, rumors had swept the pumpkin world that a monster was growing somewhere on the East Coast that was big enough to smash through the 1,500-pound barrier. It wasn't hard to guess who was growing this colossus. Pennsylvania husband-and-wife team Larry and Gerry Checkon had been setting records and winning prizes since they first turned the dirt in their pumpkin patch in 1998. They were deadly serious competitors, and extraordinarily, consistently successful. Between the two of them, they'd won their state weigh-off five of the past eight years. Gerry Checkon set a world record in 1999, her first year growing. And in 2005, word leaked out that Larry Checkon had a world-record bomb sitting in his northwestern Pennsylvania patch. Based on the measurements pumpkin growers use to estimate weight, the pumpkin was expected to be more than 1,700 pounds—which would not just beat the 1,446-pound record set in 2004, but obliterate it. The news stirred excitement, envy, and some despondency among pumpkin growers. A 1,700-pound pumpkin would be a giant leap toward the one-ton Holy Grail. It would be a tremendous mark to beat, possibly thwarting any chance at setting a new world record for years to come.

  But pumpkins have a maddening tendency to surprise. Some are dense as lead, weighing far heavier than they look, while others are corks—pleasingly round and full of air. So it was that the Checkon's 1,700-pound colossus turned out to be "only" 1,469 pounds.

  It was still a formidable accomplishment. But some growers also saw it as a sobering sign that the current round of breeding might be reaching its limit. The pumpkin's size had indicated it would weigh more than 1,700 pounds, and yet it hadn't even cracked 1,500. Why?

  Theoretically, plant scientists see no reason why giant pumpkins can't grow to 1,500 pounds, or one ton, or beyond. The trick for pumpkin growers is to figure out what is holding their plants back so they can breed improved traits into their seeds. Do the pumpkins need thicker stems to carry more nutrients? Do they need stronger root systems to support the rapid growth? Do growers need to conduct tests to find out which plants are most efficient at using the nutrients siphoned from the soil?

  It's the kind of problem farmers and botanists have been tackling for centuries to improve crops. Commercial growers have gotten so good at isolating traits and breeding them into a seed stock that the process can be accomplished in a few years. Biogenetics, in which scientists manipulate plant genes in the laboratory to produce desirable traits, has sped up the process even more.

  But a wide gulf separates commercial growers and amateur pumpkin breeders. Commercial operations produce thousands of versions of the same plant each year, giving them more control over the trait-selection process. Most pumpkin growers can barely manage a few plants a year. They pour all their efforts into producing a prizewinner, leaving little room for experimentation. Even when they do experiment, they don't have the precise controls to tell them whether their results are the product of their experiment or some other factor, such as weather or disease.

  During the cold winter months of 2006, the question of whether the new growing season might finally yield a 1,500-pound pumpkin, and which seeds were most likely to do it, consumed the community and dominated discussion boards on BigPumpkins.com.

  When Larry Checkon's pumpkin fell short of the mark in 2005, quiet sighs of relief were heard throughout giant-pumpkin land. Checkon's 1,469-pound pumpkin set a new world record, but not an unbeatable one. It left ample room for a new world record in 2006. And even more tantalizing, growers were able to hold on a little longer to their dream of growing the first 1,500-pound pumpkin. Still, some quietly wondered if the limits of Mother Nature had finally been tested. Perhaps a 1,500-pound pumpkin would never be.

  5

  Dirt

  BY THE END of March, winter was slowly beginning to release its grip on the North. As temperatures warmed, the whole world seemed to leap into action after the lull enforced by bone-chilling cold. That wasn't necessarily good news for Ron Wallace. Only in the dead of winter did his schedule ease off enough to allow him anything like a regular life. Now work was picking up again. He'd spent March hiring some new managers for the country club and searching for a pool director. Until he found one, he'd have to take charge of the spring pool maintenance himself, getting the pool drained and power-washed and ready to reopen.

  As general manager, Ron was responsible for all things great and small. At 9 P.M. he might find himself answering his office phone and helping a club member schedule a wedding, or unlocking the safe to provide a patron with an expensive cigar. Later, at home, he'd settle into bed with a sheaf of financial spreadsheets to lull him to sleep.

  The winter covers would be coming off the greens in a few days, and the golf course would be opening back up. Soon, members would be flocking in to kick off their spring season and Ron would be putting in 60-hour weeks to keep up. In the three years Ron had been overseeing club operations as general manager, the peak summer staffing had swelled to about 200 employees. "There's always someone complaining every day when you have two hundred people," he said. Not to mention nearly 500 club members that he needed to keep happy.

  Everywhere Ron looked—at home, at the office, in the pumpkin patch—he saw work that needed to be done. At home his mama goat was about to give birth to twins, and he had to decide what to do with the ornery father. He needed to build a new fence for the pony. He needed to sow grass seed over the bare dirt where his old patch had been. The fruit trees needed pruning and spraying. He needed to power-wash the windows on his house and stain the four big decks that surrounded it. He'd set a deadline of Memorial Day weekend to get it all done.

  On top of all that was the lengthy to-do list he had for getting the new patch ready for planting the first of May. After settling under the snow all winter, the garden needed to be plowed again. The dirt was still full of rocks that needed to be picked out and thrown aside. And Ron was waiting anxiously for the results of his latest soil analysis. Depending on what it said, he might have to add more of this or more of that to make sure his dirt was as good as he could get it before growing season started. He needed to get an electrical pump rigged up for the new well he'd dug to water the patch. And he needed to lay irrigation lines so he wouldn't have to drag garden hoses 300 feet across the lawn.

  He also had to figure out what he was going to do about a deer fence around the garden. Deer were one of the major problems faced by pumpkin growers. The rampant, succulent growth of a pumpkin plant was a magnet for all kinds of plant-chomping animals, and deer were especially difficult to thwart. Fences
needed to be at least 8 feet high to keep them out, and a lot of growers installed live electrical wires to repel them. But whatever Ron decided to use, putting up 400 linear feet of fence wasn't going to be cheap. The money just kept adding up.

  All of it together, hitting all at once, was leaving Ron stressed and a little cranky. The pressure of the new season was already beginning to build, with all those familiar feelings boiling up again: anticipation, excitement, and doubts about why he was even putting himself through this.

  The Giant Vegetable Growers Conference in Niagara Falls had come and gone in early March. Larry Checkon had been fitted with his new orange blazer for last year's world record, and once again, the Wallaces had to sit and watch from the audience. But it was a nice break from the winter doldrums, and a major partying opportunity for the Rhode Island growers.

  The Rhode Island mafia, as they were known throughout the pumpkin world, rented a van to drive to Niagara Falls in what amounted to an eight-hour, rolling fraternity party. They hit the road at 9 A.M. and the first beer was popped by 10. It was a long weekend of late-night drinking—"Bible study," as the growers winkingly put it. Ron stayed out late and then rolled out of bed, bleary-eyed and hungover, for the early-morning conference sessions.

  Now, with spring around the corner, everyone was itching to get started on the new growing season. Ron's phone was still ringing and his mailbox was still filling with requests for the 1068 seeds. The closer the growers got to planting time, the more urgent the requests. But Ron was trying to be firm. He had so few left. He'd gotten a bubble pack and a call from a pumpkin grower named Ed Hemphill in New Brunswick, Canada, asking for a 1068. Ron had never heard of the guy. He told him as politely as he could that he just didn't have enough seeds to fill all the requests. That's the way it was, constantly. And every refusal pained him.