Backyard Giants Read online

  Once he was in the garden and had his pumpkin plants started, some of his tension would ease, even though his workload would double. There was no doubt it was going to be tougher than ever this year. The Wallaces were growing more plants and Ron was worried about his parents. "Dad can't go so strong anymore," he said. "He's slowing down." And every day brought new challenges for his mother. "With lupus, there's always things that are happening."

  Ron had been handling his stress with late nights of heavy drinking. He'd been going hard over the winter, and brushed off suggestions that he should slow down. "When I hit that coffin, I'm gonna be slammin' into it," he said. "I'm going to be driving in full blast."

  But once the pumpkin plants went in the ground, it would be a nonissue: tending the pumpkins would soak up every minute of his spare time. He couldn't wait and he dreaded it at the same time. The thought of the hours of backbreaking work that lay ahead was a little depressing. He was single, after all. But instead of making the most of his bachelorhood in the years since his divorce, Ron had been throwing himself into his pumpkins. His treasured Pontiac GTO was sitting in his garage under a dustcover while he spent all his time digging in the dirt. And what did he have to show for it? Not a championship, that's for sure. Not a steady girlfriend. "Maybe," Ron grumbled, "maybe in a couple years I'm done with this pumpkin growing. Maybe I take my car out of the garage and go driving on the beach. Maybe I chase women."

  Ron marked the first official sign of spring on Monday, March 27: a turtle sunning itself on a rock in his backyard pond. Searching for glimpses of the turtles living in his pond was a soothing ritual for Ron. He loved all his animals, the rabbits and goats and his white pony, named Spirit by his nine-year-old niece, Rene. They were his own little petting zoo. Taking care of the animals was a lot of work, but it was something he did for Rene, who loved to play with them on her frequent visits with her grandparents, and for his friends, who sometimes brought their children over. But the turtles were Ron's alone. Over the years he'd brought home a dozen or more of them—box turtles and snapping turtles and sun turtles—that he'd found on the side of the road or in drainage ditches. He kept his eye out every day on his commutes between home and the country club. Unlike his other animals, the turtles required no extra effort. They minded their own business. Some disappeared; some stuck around. It didn't matter. But the sight of those that stayed, poking their stumpy heads up out of the water or sunning themselves on a rock, always cheered him.

  Here on the brink of April, the snow had finally melted and the daytime temperature had risen to 5 5 degrees for the second day in a row. There was only a month left to make the final preparations in the garden before planting. The first turtle sighting was the second bit of good news that Ron had received that day. The first had come that morning, when Ron checked his mailbox and found that the soil test report for his new pumpkin patch had arrived. As soon as the ground had thawed a couple weeks before, Ron and his dad had taken shovels of dirt from the patch, mixed them together in a wheelbarrow, poured a sample into a clear plastic baggie, and sent it off to the University of Massacchusetts Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Laboratory for analysis. The results would tell them how close they were to getting their dirt in the best possible condition for growing, with the proper balance of nutrients, minerals, and organic matter. As Ron held the lab envelope in his hands, he paused and took a deep breath before opening it. The whole season would hinge on what he found inside.

  Pumpkin growers are connoisseurs of animal waste: pig dung, cow dung, chicken dung, bat dung, horse dung—one grower even swears by mink dung from a commercial fur farm. To keep their soil in prime condition and give themselves the best start on each season, one of the basic tasks of growers everywhere is putting back the nutrients their pumpkins siphon out each year. Giant pumpkins are greedy things. They're huge plants that typically cover 500 to 1,200 square feet in a solid leaf canopy, with hundreds of feet of vines and a dense mat of roots spreading out dozens of feet in all directions. Once the vines begin to bear fruit, they suck in nutrients from the soil like a botanical black hole. Manure is one of the richest food sources. So each fall after the pumpkin crop is harvested and the old plants have been ripped up and thrown in the compost pile, growers begin to haul in truckloads of animal waste to renew their garden's vigor.

  As long as humans have plowed the earth to grow things, manure has been the gardener's faithful friend. Prehistoric farmers in Peru and Ecuador added seabird droppings to soil to enrich their maize and beans. Ancient Egyptians relied on manure for fertilizing their crops while developing advanced methods of irrigation and crop rotation. And Roman gardeners indulged the Emperor Tiberius's year-round craving for cucumbers by raising them in baskets full of dung. Some garden historians speculate that medieval monks even positioned their monastery latrines close to their kitchen gardens to provide a ready source of human manure.

  So in that grand tradition, the giant-pumpkin growers' obsession with animal droppings makes a lot of sense.

  But it's only one part of a larger obsession with the most basic necessity of gardening: the soil. Growers spend nine months each year working in the dirt. They till it, hoe it, rake it, water it, dig in it, stir it around, crawl in it, squeeze it, smell it, and even taste it. They get so intimately acquainted with their dirt, so attached to it, that it becomes either their best friend or their worst enemy. One West Coast grower admitted to digging up all the tons of carefully tended dirt in his pumpkin patch and taking it with him to his new house when he had to move.

  After years of trial and error, Ron and Dick believed they'd finally figured out what they'd been doing wrong with their soil. In the early years, they had poured on the chemical fertilizers. They had hauled in truckloads of fresh manure and compost without bothering to have the contents analyzed. They didn't know then what they knew now: You can bring in a lot of bad stuff with every load of manure if you're not careful, including nasty microbes that weaken plants and cause disease.

  The Wallaces' heavy use of chemicals made things worse by killing off much of the good bacteria and fungi that might have helped fight off the bad guys. It was like throwing open the gates of their garden to an invading army. "We thought by doing everything in excess, we'd get excess in return," Dick said. And they did, except it was an excess of disease.

  The soil holds the water the plant drinks and is home to a teeming world of microorganisms that work in concert with the plant to help it thrive. But the soil also can contain harmful bacteria and fungi that can turn a pumpkin into mush in the blink of an eye. Organic matter, such as decaying twigs and leaves and bugs, provide nutrients and improve soil structure. Minerals critical to a plant's growth also reside in the dirt, including nitrogen, potassium, calcium, and sulphur. Well-balanced soil with plenty of organic matter offers better drainage while making essential oxygen, water, and minerals more available to the plant.

  In short, if you've got good dirt, your plant will be healthy and vigorous, capable of supporting the explosive growth of a giant pumpkin. If you've got bad dirt, your plant will be weak, disease-ridden, and prone to insect damage—if it grows at all. No world-record pumpkin had ever come from bad dirt.

  That's why Ron had been so excited about the new source of cow manure compost he'd found last November. He'd spent more than $100 testing several different composts, including ones made from worm castings and fish by-products. But none held a candle to the cow manure pile in that farmer's pasture.

  He needed more than manure though. Ron had first tested the raw dirt in the new patch last fall, before he'd even started clearing it, and the results were better than he'd expected. The Wallaces had a sandy loam soil in their yard, and they were starting with 5.8 percent organic matter, which wasn't bad; the desirable range for vegetables is 4 to 10 percent organic matter. But the Wallace dirt still needed a lot of work before it would be capable of supporting a world-class pumpkin. Its levels of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and magnesium—all key nutrien
ts for plant growth—were low, as were the pH levels, which measure the acidity of the soil. Acidity affects how well a plant is able to absorb nutrients, and since 14 of the 17 critical nutrients for plant growth are found in the soil, growers have to get their pH levels right to get the most out of their plants. Pumpkins like slightly acidic to neutral soil. A pH of about 6.5 to 6.8—about the same as human saliva—is usually considered ideal.

  In the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers' spring newsletter, Ron had published a comparison of soil reports from the patches that grew the two biggest pumpkins in 2005: Larry Checkon's record-setting 1,469-pounder and Scott Palmer's 1,443pounder. Over the years, Ron had studied the soil tests of about 25 top growers and formed his own ideas about what worked best for giant pumpkins. "I looked at who's growing in clay, sandy loam, who's organic," he said. "What someone is using in their soil may not work with yours. But if you look at them all, you've got to be in that ballpark."

  Larry's and Scott's results looked similar. Larry's pH was 6.1; Scott's was 6.5. Larry had 13.8 percent organic matter; Scott had 9.4 percent. Mineral levels varied slightly, but there was nothing dramatic separating the two plots of dirt, even though they were located almost 500 miles apart.

  From his years of research, Ron knew what he was looking for, and he also knew how hard it would be to get his soil perfectly balanced in just a few months. He hadn't even had the full benefit of the fall. Growers start working on their soil the minute their old plants come out of the ground in October so the newly mixed dirt has as much time as possible to "cook" over the winter. No matter how perfect you get the soil chemistry—and getting that right is hard enough—Mother Nature still needs to lend a hand to break down the components, meld them together, and work a little alchemy to make all the nutrients accessible to the plants in the spring. The Wallaces hadn't been able to get into their new patch until the end of November, so they had started out behind the rest of the competitive community. And they knew the odds of getting the soil balanced just right in the first year weren't high. But Ron was determined to give it his best shot. Surely all those years of research and advising others how to do it right would pay off for him now. "I'm not giving up," he said.

  The first test results last fall had shown that the dirt in Ron's new patch was too acidic, with a pH rating of 5.5. The easiest way to remedy that was to add lots of alkaline lime to the dirt. Manure would provide an abundance of the other nutrients and organic matter and improve the soil structure so that it would absorb water more efficiently. So as soon as they plowed their patch that freezing day in December, Ron and Dick had heaped on tons of cow and chicken manure and tilled in 1,000 pounds of lime, which also is rich in calcium and magnesium. But Ron had stopped there.

  He wasn't about to forget how overdoing it had cost him and his father all those years. So he held back, adding even less than he thought it really needed. "We always thought we had to be adding something and doing something. And we were adding nothing but trouble," he said. He was determined to wait and see how the compost and lime worked for him over the winter. When he got the soil analysis in the spring, he'd know exactly how much more needed to be done.

  And on March 27, that moment had finally arrived. Ron tore open the envelope from the soil lab and quickly scanned the typewritten sheet of paper filled with charts and figures. His heart leaped. The numbers looked good. In fact, they looked great. The pH was up to 6.3; the basic nutrient levels had all jumped into the high range. His soil wasn't too far off from that of Scott Palmer's championship patch. But it wasn't quite perfect. There was a little more fine-tuning that needed to be done. He wanted to boost the soil's pH a little more, increase the level of basic minerals like calcium and magnesium, and add more organic material.

  The soil report arrived at the perfect time. That Monday was the first day of Ron's two-week vacation—the first vacation he'd taken in more than a year. He hoped to get down to Florida with a friend later in the week, but first, he had work to do in his patch. Over the next few days, Ron and his dad tilled in 400 pounds of lime, 400 pounds of gypsum, 160 pounds of kelp seaweed meal and 15 cubic yards of the farmer's cow manure. The Wallaces again called on Donald Salisbury, the farmer down the road who was always willing to help out his eccentric neighbors with their pumpkin patch. Salisbury brought over his tractor with a backhoe attachment to help spread the manure. Later that week, Joe Jutras came by with his smaller tractor and tilled the remaining big dirt clods into the soft, fine soil of a garden ready for planting. With those additions, "I'm right in that golden range where I like to be," Ron said with satisfaction.

  But there was another problem to be solved: Drainage in the patch was terrible. Ron dug a foot-deep hole, filled it with water, and timed how long it took to drain: three hours. All the heavy equipment running over the land had compacted the topsoil into a dense layer. If he left it like that, a few days of rain could drown his plants. So Ron spent another couple hundred dollars on a piece of equipment called a subsoiler, a long bar with a narrow plow blade bolted on it that's dragged behind a tractor. The contraption dug down 18 inches to break up the hard crust and churn up the soil. Donald Salisbury brought his tractor over again to drag the subsoiler through the patch. After that, the test hole drained in about 25 minutes.

  By now, the weather was beautiful, with temperatures climbing into the 70s. But Ron's worries weren't over yet. It had been dry all winter, and they'd had a record dry March. Ron had dug a shallow well next to his patch, counting on there being enough rain to keep it filled. But the water level in the well had dropped three feet over the winter. They needed more rain.

  Dick wasn't troubled by any of it. Dick, in fact, was on cloud nine. The patch was primed, and so was the Wallace team. "We're going to make an all-out assault on the world record," Dick declared.

  While Ron and Dick went about the huge task of creating a new garden from scratch in just a few months, their friends and rivals in the giant-pumpkin world were also busy tilling and hauling in tons of supplements to prepare their old patches for another season.

  Scott Palmer was an exception to the rule. He took a lot of flack each year from his fellow Rhode Island growers for his low-key approach to his garden. He lived just down the road from the Wallaces—about five minutes away, if you drove slow. That made it easy for Scott to drop by any time he needed advice, and for Dick or Ron to drop by and offer help from time to time. This was a mixed blessing. Scott was the first to admit he didn't take pumpkin growing as seriously as the Wallaces. "I don't really have a competitive bone in my body," he said. "I grow pumpkins because I like growing them. And you know, [the Wallaces have] been bustin' my balls for years."

  That was the price of membership in the Rhode Island club. Ron and Dick cut no slack for anyone. Their expectations were high, and their teasing was merciless. Not a painless thing to endure even for a low-key, easy-tempered guy like Scott. A welder, Scott grabbed extra jobs whenever he could, seven days a week, to support his wife, Shelley, and Scottie Jr., their nine-year-old son. Scott and Shelley often worked on the pumpkins together, and the fruit that won the 2005 SNGPG weigh-off had been registered in both their names.

  No one could figure out how a 1,44 3-pound pumpkin had come out of Scott's patch. He hadn't even done much to supplement his soil last year; he was too busy, and it was too expensive, but also, he didn't really think it was necessary. And then he'd grown the second-biggest pumpkin in the world. Now Scott was the poster boy for less-is-more.

  But the other growers still gave him a hard time about it. And the quieter Scott got, the more they piled on. Scott was there, reliably, at all the club meetings, but he seldom said a word. "I like to be there," he said. "I love those guys. I like listening to them. I love listening to Ronnie and the way he puts things. But I just don't have any input. If they need something, if they need something welded, I can help that way."

  Scott lived on two wide-open acres of land, with plenty of room to make his garden as big as
he wanted. But he purposely kept it small. He had decided to grow only three plants this year, just as he had last year. Even if he wasn't as obsessed as some of the other growers, Scott still worked hard at growing his pumpkins. "You've got to like being outside. You can't be one of those guys who comes home and is tired and wants to sit on the couch. You've got to come home and work even when you're tired," he said.

  Also like last year, Scott had decided not to add much to his soil this year. No mixing in tons and tons of manure and compost and extra minerals like the other guys. "I don't want to switch anything up because I want to see what works. You need a baseline," he reasoned.

  The other growers had started warning Scott that he needed to think about moving his patch to new dirt or he risked developing a disease problem. Anyone who grew several years in one place had to worry about that. But Scott wasn't ready to move yet. His patch had proved lucky for him. "Let's not fix it if it's not broken," he said.

  On the West Coast, 2,500 miles away, Jack and Sherry LaRue were taking an entirely different approach to patch preparation. In the spring of 2004, Jack had watched a video called The Living Soil, produced by a Japanese agricultural research center. The video promoted the idea of a "no till" growing program. At first, it sounded like gardening heresy. Asking gardeners not to till their soil is a little like telling musicians not to tune their instruments before a concert. After all, humans have been cultivating the earth since we figured out how to drag a branch through the dirt. By 3000 B.C., farmers in Mesopotamia and Egypt were harnessing oxen to their wooden plows to prepare the ground for planting. Plowing and tilling was how pumpkin growers mixed in the tons of manure and other supplements they added each year to their old soil. It aerated the garden and improved drainage.