Backyard Giants Read online

  But Jack LaRue was a man who liked to try different things. He and his wife lived on a secluded hilltop in the lush wooded landscape of the Pacific Northwest, where they'd raised their children and tended a flock of ducks and geese and peacocks and grew their pumpkins. Jack had a curious mind and wasn't afraid to break with tradition if he thought he saw a better way. He charted his own path in seed genetics, following his own instincts and ideas about how best to improve seed lines and bring out more desirable traits for bigger, tougher pumpkins. "Jack," as one grower put it, "is always experimenting with some cockamamie thing." But the growing community took a keen interest in whatever cockamamie thing Jack was trying because he consistently grew some of the biggest pumpkins in the world. He had more 1,000-pounders to his name than any other grower, and he'd missed the 2004 world record by only 26 pounds; his 1,420-pound pumpkin set the U.S. record before losing the world title to Canadian grower Al Eaton's 1,446-pounder.

  Jack had become one of the hobby's most deeply admired legends not only for his growing skills, but also for his generosity in sharing information and encouraging new growers. His independent ways were dictated mainly by his firm grip on common sense. If something sounded logical to him, he was willing to give it a try. If it sounded silly, he was the first to say so. It helped that the LaRues gave themselves lots of room for error—they grew more than 20 plants every year on a three-quarter-acre plot at their home in Tenino, Washington, just south of the state capital, Olympia, where Jack worked as a federal grain inspector. Jack, a sturdy, square-built, 54-year-old with the springy vigor of a much younger man, gave all the credit for his energy and fitness to his pumpkin patch: his workout program, he called it.

  But there was also much to do on the io-acre homestead Jack and Sherry had bought in the mid-1990s. Their house was burrowed into the trees near the end of a narrow, one-lane dirt road. "We live on a dead end off a dead end," Sherry liked to tell people when giving directions to their home. They had cleared a couple of acres near the top of the hill for their home site and pumpkin patch. Around the back of the house were pens and a small pond for their ducks and geese and five peacocks. A recently adopted stray dog and 13 cats of various colors and sizes had free run of the property.

  Sherry, a tiny woman with black, short-bobbed hair, taught first and second grade at the elementary school in Tenino, population 1,584, and coached volleyball at the local middle school. Jack and Sherry had raised four daughters and now were enjoying two grandbabies. Originally, Jack was the family gardener while Sherry stayed busy raising kids. But now they grew pumpkins together, carefully dividing the garden into his-and-her plots.

  Jack still grew the bulk of the pumpkin crop; Sherry selected just a few plants to concentrate on each year. But those were indisputably hers. She did all the work and made all the decisions. When her pumpkins failed, she felt the pain, and when she grew a big one, she got the glory. She had taken the last two growing seasons off to spend time with their youngest daughter, who was graduating from college and about to leave home for the wider world. Now, with their last child gone, Sherry was ready to grow pumpkins again.

  Like many long-married couples who have gone through life's uphills and downhills together, Jack and Sherry were reflections of each other. Both were active and industrious, good-natured, and eager to help friends and strangers. There was a joyousness in their pumpkin growing that celebrated the wonders of nature, the ingenuity of mankind, and the spirit of competition. Both could talk a blue streak.

  Jack had taken to the theory of no-till gardening promoted in the Japanese video. It was based on a simple back-to-nature con cept that appealed to his lifelong love of the outdoors. Forests never needed tilling for plant life to thrive, he reasoned. Each year new organic matter was added to the soil by falling leaves, rotting tree branches, and dying grasses, ferns, and flowers. But none of that was tilled in. It just lay on top, with layer after layer of new organic matter gradually breaking down and releasing a steady supply of nutrients to feed each new generation of plants. Meanwhile, earthworms, insects, moles, ants, and other subterranean creatures did a good job of keeping the soil loose and aerated.

  Tilling a garden each fall and spring destroys all Mother Nature's hard work, the theory argues. The tiller grinds through the tunnels and pathways opened up by subterranean creatures. Earthworms and beneficial bacteria and fungi are destroyed. Tilling does eliminate weeds, and it undoubtedly loosens the soil, but only temporarily. "What happens when you take dust, air and water and mix them?" Jack asked in an essay on no-till gardening he wrote for his growing club, the Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers. "Mud. It's like mixing cement. Mud will dry hard with very little oxygen left in it. The same thing happens when we till our gardens."

  After watching the video before the spring of 2004, Jack tilled only lightly, turning the top few inches of old compost to loosen the surface crust and remove weeds. That was the last time he tilled, and he has been pleased with the results. Before 2004, the LaRues had grown only three pumpkins over the 1,000-pound mark, with a top weight of 1,064 pounds. But after adopting the no-till policy, Jack and Sherry grew 18 pumpkins over 1,000 pounds, with their 1,420-pounder still among the top 10 biggest ever grown in the world. That had made the LaRues the hobby's top growers, judged by the average weight of their best 10 pumpkins, which stood at 1,176.3 pounds after the 2005 growing season. That was a better average than Larry and Gerry Checkon, both world champions, or any other world champion. But the LaRues, despite their phenomenal success at growing big pumpkins, had yet to grow the biggest pumpkin of any given year. Jack and Sherry, along with much of the rest of the pumpkin world, believed it was only a matter of time.

  "Is the no-till method the next step to the 1,500 pound pump­kin?" Jack asked in his essay. "I do not know. Will this practice continue to work? I do not know. Will problems develop in the future because of this practice? Again, I do not know. All I can tell you is that no till appears to work."

  6

  Planting

  DICK WALLACE LEANED over the wagon cart full of pumpkin seedlings with his forearms resting on the side like a schoolboy peering over the infield wall. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt with the jumbled black-and-gray pattern of winter camouflage. A white Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers cap shaded his eyes from the bright morning sun. His eyes squinted in concentration as he watched his son sort through the 20 plants in the cart.

  They had decided to grow five 1068s, plus five other assorted seeds. The extra seedlings would be given away. It was perfect planting weather, and Ron and Dick were eager to get started. But the season's outcome depended on them choosing the best seedlings, and they lingered over the decision. Numbers scrawled on the outside of each pot with a black Magic Marker identified the plants: 500, 1354, 12.25, 851, 845, 1068, etc. Ron and Dick didn't need the names of the growers to know which seedlings were which. They knew the seed numbers better than they knew their own social security ID's.

  Each baby plant still had the two oval leaves known as "cots"— short for cotyledons—the first leaves to emerge from the seed. These first leaves are the starter engine for the plant, providing energy while it begins to produce a root system. Within a few days, the first "true" leaf sprouts, a tiny, crinkled wad that quickly grows into a mature leaf. A fully grown giant-pumpkin leaf would be big enough to nearly fill the wagon. But on these seedlings, the baby leaves ranged from the size of a pea to the size of Ron's palm.

  "I really like this one. That was our 1070," Ron said, thoughtfully tapping the side of one pot.

  "What did we grow that from?" asked Dick.

  "That was our 500 crossed with the 851 Davies," Ron said. "Now, that 1260 there—"

  "Maybe we should put that in instead of one of the 1068s?" Dick suggested. But Ron was still concentrating on the seedlings, not paying much attention to his father. "The 1260 with the 845," he muttered, studying the plants, thinking out loud.

  "Maybe we should give that a shot and just go
with four 1068s," Dick persisted.

  "We've got more 1068s upstairs," Ron said absently, not answering his father but replying to some other question hovering in his mind. He moved another plant to one side. Deep down he knew it was a little pointless. The crummiest seedlings could turn out to be the most robust plants, and vice versa. World-champion lore was full of ugly-duckling stories. But too much was at stake. If he was going to have a chance at winning this year, he had to play every step as if it were the most important step of the season.

  "Okay," he said suddenly, straightening up. "We're loaded for bear. Let's just go for it." Ron knew planting five 1068s might be putting too many eggs in one basket. But he believed it was the best seed in the world, and it was theirs so they could afford to plant as many as they wanted. "This is the last year we're going to do ten plants," he reasoned. "We might as well be pigs about it."

  Spring was finally taking hold in New England. The part of central Rhode Island where the Wallaces lived was thickly wooded, but the landscape still had the transparency of winter, with houses and sky clearly visible beyond the bare branches of the trees along the road. Though not for much longer. Neon-green buds brought a tinge of new color to the scene, soon the forest would thicken with leaves and transform the winding road to the Wallace house into a lushly forested drive.

  As they did every year, the Wallaces had started far more plants than they really needed. Part of it was just good growing strategy: There's no guarantee any given seed would germinate; and even if every seed sprouted, having an abundance of seedlings allowed them to sort through and choose the best-looking ones to plant. But Ron and Dick grew even more than that. They also wanted to have enough extra plants to spread around to other club members who might run into some early bad luck. Ron and Dick had done that numerous times before, as did many other growers. The delicate seedlings were especially prone to disaster just after planting. Killing frosts, high winds, a sneaky fungus, an attack of slugs or cucumber beetles—any number of perils awaited the tender, young plants once they were in the ground. Ron and Dick liked being able to come to the rescue with replacements. In 2005, Steve Connolly had grown his 1,333-pounder from a 1068 seedling the Wallaces had given him after his entire garden was wiped out by a frost in mid-May. As leaders of the Southern New England pumpkin growers club, Ron and Dick felt a responsibility to look out for fellow club members. Especially this year. If the club was going to repeat its success of the previous season, all the growers needed to be in the game with the best plants they could get.

  But there was another factor weighing in this year: the reputation of the 1068 Wallace. Reports were trickling in from growers who were having trouble sprouting their 1068 seeds. That was a very big deal. Some growers had paid hundreds of dollars for a single 1068 seed in club fund-raising auctions. Others had wrangled and begged and traded to get their hands on the hottest seed of the season. Regardless of how it had been obtained, each 1068 hit the dirt that spring with the highest of hopes, often with the prized spot in the garden reserved for it. So when the seed just sat there, a dud, the disappointment was extreme.

  It was May 7, and the 2006 growing season was finally off and running. Giant-pumpkin growers across the northern hemisphere were excitedly greeting spring with a trowel, a fistful of pumpkin seeds, and a bag of sterile potting soil. Nothing said you couldn't just plant a pumpkin seed directly into the ground. But few growers did it that way. They wanted as much control as possible over their plants from the very first day. Anyway, in many northern areas, it was still too cold to plant outdoors. A seed might rot in the ground before it had a chance to warm up enough to sprout. And if a grower had to wait a few weeks for the weather to warm up, then the whole season would be thrown off. Growers stick to a very tight schedule. They have only five precious months to turn each seed into a giant pumpkin ready for harvest, and they need every growing day they can get.

  That meant pushing the envelope a little. Growers could get a jump on the growing season by starting the seeds in pots indoors a week or two before the weather warmed enough to put the plants into the ground. Just like every other aspect of giant-pumpkin growing, seed-starting invited controversy and debate. There are about as many ways to start a seed as there are seeds to grow. Growers develop their own system, and if it works, they stick with it. Ron and Dick's system was to use a fingernail file to buff the rounded end of each seed, carefully grinding away part of the shell to allow moisture to seep in more quickly, thus giving the seed a better chance of sprouting before rotting. They prepared the dirt in the peat pots where each seed would be planted, mixing in a little liquid seaweed fertilizer and a "root shield" product to help ward off disease. This season, they added in another special ingredient, a booster that Ron hoped would help push them over the top.

  Pumpkin growers, like competitors everywhere, are always looking for an edge over their opponents. Every year seemed to bring some new theory, product, or practice that promised to lift a grower over his rivals. Often, it was as simple as a new fertilizer formula. Sometimes it was something odd, like the idea of feeding milk to pumpkins.

  Many of each season's new theories were acquired in the doldrums of winter, when restless growers fed their pumpkin obsession by turning to the Internet for research. World champion Larry Checkon had decided to try aspirin this year. He'd run across several recent agricultural studies proving that the acetylsalicylic acid contained in aspirin could stimulate a plant's defense systems, making it more disease resistant. The prescription: one to two aspirins dissolved in a couple of gallons of water, then sprinkled over the plants' leaves.

  This year, Ron Wallace had been intrigued by the potential of beneficial fungi. His dirt studies over the winter had led him to the work of a scientist named Dr. Robert Linderman at the USDA's Horticultural Crops Research Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon. A whole world of microbes is present and functioning in the underground root zone of plants. How those microbes work and how they interact with plants to affect their growth and health had become the focus of Linderman's research. His specialty was mycor-rhizal fungi, a particular type of fungi that scientists believe existed during the time plants first migrated from water to land about 450 million years ago.

  Many fungi live symbiotically with plants and animals. Mycor-rhizal fungi specialize in roots. Their spores can remain dormant in earth for years, springing into action only when they bump into the spreading roots of a plant. Then, the fungus infiltrates the roots, branching out in a network of tiny filaments known as hy-phae. The fungus feeds off the plant roots, but it also acts as a bridge between the soil and the plant, penetrating into nooks and crannies of the dirt where the bigger roots can't reach and ferrying nutrients and water back to the plant. One cubic centimeter of hy-phae webbing—about the size of a sugar cube—could be stretched out over the length of a football field, according to Dr. Linderman.

  Plants depend on this fungal relationship to survive—or at least to thrive. The fungi produce stronger, more disease-resistant plants that grow bigger and yield more fruit. With the nutritional boost they get from the fungi, plants can better tolerate hostile growing situations such as drought and high-salt conditions.

  After running across Linderman's research on the Internet, Ron Wallace called up the scientist and spent hours picking his brain on how he might use mycorrhizal fungi in his pumpkin patch. "He was an enthusiastic guy, and so am I, so we hit it off pretty quickly," said Linderman, who was amused to think that his life's work might be used to give a competitive edge to giant-pumpkin growers.

  Ron wasn't the first pumpkin grower to discover mycorrhizal fungi. It had been used off and on by growers for years, mainly around the roots of seedlings when they were transplanted. But Ron learned from Linderman that growers hadn't been using the fungus in a way that would bring the maximum benefit. Pumpkin plants were so big, with such extensive root systems, that doses of the fungus needed to be added repeatedly as the plant grew bigger throughout the season.


  This was a revelation Ron believed might give him a badly needed edge, and he resolved to try it. As he planted his seeds in the peat pots, he added a pinch of the mycorrhizal fungi spores, which looked a little like dried yeast. If all went well, the spores would attach themselves to the roots of the seedling and multiply with the growing plant.

  Ron and Dick then placed the seeds into the peat pots, with the pointy tip, where the root emerges, pointing down into the specially prepared dirt. Then the pots were placed inside a homemade germination box. For that, Dick and Ron had taken an ordinary, medium-sized plastic storage container—like the kind sold at Wal- Mart—and drilled one-inch holes all around the base for ventilation and electrical wire access. On the bottom of the box, they laid a board fitted with three lightbulb sockets in a row down the middle, in which they placed 75-watt bulbs to generate just the right amount of heat. They mounted a wire grate about six inches above the bulbs, and on this grate they set the peat pots. They replaced the container's lid with a thick sheet of clear plastic, which trapped the heat and moisture while giving Ron and Dick a view of their seeds' progress.

  After hearing that some growers were having problems germinating their 1068s, the Wallaces had started another half-dozen or so seeds to be sure they had enough to share with anyone in their club who needed one. On planting day, the Wallaces had three more 1068s just beginning to break the surface of the soil inside the germination box. Dick had rigged a digital thermometer to monitor the temperature and humidity inside the box. According to the gauges, the temperature hovered at 92.5 degrees, with 32 percent humidity.