Backyard Giants Read online

  When people asked Joe what he did for a living, he replied humbly, "I'm a woodworker." In fact, he and his two brothers ran a very successful high-end custom woodworking business, Jutras Woodworking, Inc., in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Joe inherited his love of carpentry from his father, a cabinetmaker. He and his brother Paul started their own residential-remodeling business in 1980, and later were joined by a third brother, Rick. Now they manufactured dramatic ceiling moldings and custom cabinetry for multimillion-dollar mansions. They designed and manufactured custom furniture, like tables, wardrobes, and entertainment centers, and made built-in wood furnishings and wall paneling for yachts. The three brothers divided the duties of the business according to their particular strengths and interests. One brother was in charge of the administrative side. Another was in charge of sales and customer service. And Joe ran the back of the shop, where he spent his days breathing in the smell of fresh sawdust as the wood took shape beneath his hands.

  As Joe led Dick and Cathy back to his pumpkin patch, they passed by his cool-weather vegetable garden. He reached down into a bushy-leafed plant, snapped off a stalk of rhubarb, and munched as he walked, savoring the grassy, sweet-tart taste. Joe was 50, and he'd been growing giant pumpkins for 10 years. But now that his kids were older—he had a 19-year-old daughter and a 22-year-old son, who was following him into the family business—he had more time for his pumpkins.

  In the pumpkin patch, Joe could match the Wallaces hard-luck story for hard-luck story. In 2005, he'd grown eight plants. He lost one to deer and one to woodchucks munching on the vines.

  He had to pull out one that was crowding too close to his other plants. He lost one when the stem split. He had one amazing pumpkin that had wowed him by growing 3 5 pounds a day for a week, then 37.5 pounds a day for two weeks. It put on 770 pounds in three weeks, and reached nearly 1,300 pounds before it split open on August 18. "It was growing so fast, and it was so heavy, I knew something had to go wrong," Joe said. "It was headed on a world-record pace. I could easily have broken the fifteen hundred mark if it had kept going."

  But Joe was philosophical about it. "You expect them to break. When you go to these weigh-offs, you hear nothing but horror stories. It's just one heartache after another."

  Joe wanted the world record as much as any other competitive pumpkin grower. But he rarely talked about it. He just grew his pumpkins. This year he was growing eight again, and he was trying some new ideas. He was going to let the vines grow longer, which would make bigger plants—he expected each plant to fill 900 to 1,100 square feet of space, compared to about 600 square feet apiece last year. To make room, he had plowed up more lawn to expand his main pumpkin patch and plowed another small patch farther back on the property.

  Tons of manure and compost later, Joe was ready to start the season. "But the soil here isn't that good," he told Dick as he showed off his handiwork. "I had to till this thing about fifteen times to break it up. I beat the shit out of it with the tiller. So I don't know what's going to happen."

  Joe and Dick toured the pumpkin patch while Sue and Cathy stayed behind at the house to visit. Joe was eager to explain a new pruning technique he planned to try this year. He crouched down on the grass next to the patch and leaned over to draw in the dirt with a stick. "I'm going to grow 'em like this," he said, tracing several straight lines in the soft soil to represent pumpkin vines. "They're all going to meet in the middle, and I'm going to grow 'em backward." He traced several more curving lines. "The main will go this way," he said, the stick scraping a trough in the dirt. "This side vine I'm going to grow out this way"—another line—"this one I'll grow back this way, and then back this way."

  Dick looked down at what Joe had traced in the dirt, which looked roughly like an upside-down pitchfork. "So you're going to have a lot more in back of the plant?" Dick asked.

  "Yeah," said Joe. "I want to change it up. Try something new." He stood up and followed Dick, who wobbled out along the single-plank walkway to a greenhouse sitting in the middle of the patch. Dick propped open the lid and looked inside. Ten four-inch-square plastic pots sat on a white warming plate. The seedlings were barely out of the dirt, and most had just two cot leaves bracketing the stem. Joe leaned over and peeked in. "I'm in trouble with a couple of them," he told Dick. "This one I put out this morning. I don't know if it's going to work." He pointed to a 1068 seedling with a puckered and curled leaf. "Aww, what's the harm of a friggin' curled leaf," said Dick. "Half the guys can't even get theirs to germinate, and you're worried about a curled leaf?"

  The two men leaned against the side of the small greenhouse, looking down as Joe assessed his seedlings. He wasn't thrilled with how his season was starting. He pointed to another plant, saying, "Look at how crazy that one is; it came up all twisted." The seedling leaned drunkenly against the edge of the pot, one leaf curled under.

  "If you could have seen the 1068 we gave Steve Connolly last year, you would have thrown up," Dick offered. He meant this as encouragement.

  "See that 1372?" Joe went on. "It's a goner too. I took that out of the shell today and there's no root on it."

  "Yeah, but it's starting to turn green."

  "Naw. There's nothing there." Joe leaned over to pick up the pot, then plucked the seedling out of the dirt to show Dick. The stem ended bluntly—like a broken toothpick stuck in the dirt. "See, there's nothing there. No root."

  "We had one 1068 that that happened to," Dick said, thinking of his own experience plucking a seedling out of its pot.

  "Now look at this here, that 842," Joe said, getting worked up, happy to have someone to sympathize with him. "I looked at that seed and I thought it was a great seed. Great lookin'. But it didn't do anything. I can usually tell in thirty-two hours if the seed is starting to pop and develop a root. That thing didn't do anything, Dick. I put it back up on top of my refrigerator. Next day, still nothing. I took it, put it back in some water, squeezed it, put some more water in there, put it back on top of the fridge. But I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't make it either."

  Dick was incredulous. "You germinated all these on top of the refrigerator?"

  "Well," Joe said, sensing Dick's disapproval, "in a paper towel. And I've got a heating pad."

  "Boy, you know, I hate that paper towel thing," said Dick.

  "I like the paper towel thing," said Joe, rallying to his own defense. "Because you know if it's going to take. I knew right away that this one isn't going to take."

  "But that's where a lot of guys screw up, because they leave it too long in there and it rots," Dick insisted.

  Joe, ever the diplomat, agreed. "Yeah. And you can damage your root if you don't take it out in time," he said, closing the subject.

  Talk turned to Joe's 1225 Jutras seed, which had come from one of the most beautiful orange giant pumpkins ever grown. Dick told Joe that he and Ron had decided to grow the plant, but they weren't going to grow a pumpkin on it. Instead, they would just use the pollen from its male flowers to fertilize other pumpkins in their garden, transferring the orange genetics into their 1068 line. After that, they'd pull the 1225 plant out. Joe's eyes crinkled in a bemused smile. This was an insult to his prized beauty.

  "What?" he said. "You're not going to grow it?"

  "No," said Dick. "We're being piggish on the 1068s this year."

  "Well, the 1225 isn't exactly shabby."

  "I know it ain't," said Dick. "It ain't shabby. But we just want the pollen out of it right now because we want to give enough space to the 1068s this year. We've got to get off the shag somehow. You know, last year we had to sit and just watch you guys, and that hurt. And the year before I had to sit and watch you guys all weigh heavier than me. I'm sick of this shit!"

  Joe laughed. Dick grinned. "And this year we'll probably have it even worse, and I'll just quit," Dick concluded.

  They walked the planks back to the edge of the patch. Before Dick left, Joe steered him over to his compost pile near the tree line. Joe picked up a stou
t stick and dug into the huge, slightly slimy mound of rotting vegetation, turning over a big chunk. Hundreds of slithering earthworms boiled up. Joe beamed. "They're in there by the thousands." he said. "But you can't put 'em in the garden yet. If you till 'em, you kill 'em. So what I'm going to do is just sprinkle them on top, maybe in July when the soil is warmer." Dick nodded appreciatively. Every grower knows that nothing aerates the garden better than a good batch of earthworms.

  The men wandered back up to the house where Sue and Cathy stood talking on the concrete driveway in front of the garage. Sue was telling Cathy about a cruise she was planning to go on with her daughter and her daughter's fiance. The two couples chatted pleasantly, exchanging tidbits of their lives. Joe mentioned he was working with a beautiful butternut wood at the shop, making a dressing room for a new house. "It's a very soft wood that we don't use that often," he said.

  That gave Dick an idea. "When I go, Joe—that's the last thing I want to ask you—when I go, I want you to build me a casket shaped like a pumpkin, and I'll curl up in there and you can bury me in there."

  "Roots up or down, Dick?"

  "Bury me in a fetal position."

  Cathy rolled her eyes. She'd endured 15 years of pumpkin jokes. The charm had worn off long ago. "There will be no pumpkins at my funeral," she said firmly.

  The evening light was fading. Black mayflies had emerged from the grass and were swarming thickly in the air, flitting around their heads in dark clouds. Breathing became hazardous. Dick and Cathy headed for their car.

  Early the next morning in southern Massachusetts, Steve Connolly paused at the edge of his sun-flooded pumpkin patch. He turned to walk away, hesitated, then turned back, staring at the garden. "It's like this every year," he said, with a little, self-conscious laugh.

  "What's the right thing to do? The worries never end."

  Steve had been up since 5 A.M., taking his daily run down the winding road along the wooded edge of Borderland State Park in southeastern Massachusetts, and back again to the piece of ground that had been in his family for more than 100 years. Jogging was one of the things that kept Steve wiry thin at the age of 51. That, and moving 90 miles per hour through the rest of his life. He worked as a plastics engineer for a company that manufactures medical implants like knee joints and heart valves. At home he was a husband to Nancy, and a father to their 15-year-old son, Scotty,

  Steve was soft-spoken, drifting silently in the background while the more-gregarious pumpkin growers hogged the spotlight with their pranks and tall tales. But he was always intense, always focused, a deadly serious competitor. Steve Connolly was that kid everybody remembers from kindergarten who would go off quietly into a corner and build a giant castle, complete with drawbridge and gun turrets, while the other kids were still arguing over who got the green blocks and who got the blue blocks. Before he joined the Southern New England club, the Rhodies had viewed Steve as a little aloof, a little secretive. But after being named a club director in 2006, he was proving himself invaluable by recruiting sponsors, contributing long, well-researched articles to the club newsletter, and documenting events with digital photos that he promptly e-mailed around to members.

  Steve had seen his first Atlantic Giant during a family outing to the Topsfield Fair in 1992. About 70 of the giant pumpkins were lined up for the annual competition, and he was astounded by the sight. For 20 years, Steve had been tending a kitchen garden that was carved into the sloping lawn at the side of his house. The land once served as an apple orchard and cow farm, and was covered in rich, 12-inch-deep topsoil. After seeing the giants at the Topsfield Fair, pumpkins took over his life.

  Now, on this morning, Steve was preoccupied with questions. He had been planning to put his second pumpkin plant in the ground, but he was concerned about the weather. The forecast was predicting frost that night, so he'd decided to wait another day. But then he was worried that he was getting a later start than other growers. Of course, a late start hadn't stopped him from growing a 1,3 3 3-pounder last year—the second-place winner in the Frerich's Farm weigh-off and the fifth-biggest pumpkin grown in the world in 2005. That season had started off disastrously, with a mid-May frost wiping out his fledgling pumpkin brood. He had to go begging for plants to rescue his season and had snagged a 1068 from Ron and Dick Wallace. The plant, which had been sitting in its pot nearly a month, looked terrible—he would have thought it hopeless if it had not been his best hope. So he put it in the ground and tended it, and it flourished. The 1,3 3 3-pounder he produced from the 1068 had helped propel the seed's fame.

  Steve wasn't looking for another miracle turnaround this year. He'd much prefer things to go smoothly from the start. And the forecast of frost, so reminiscent of last year, was not a welcome development. But he'd prepared extra fortifications. He'd rigged a makeshift heater inside his greenhouses by cutting a hole in the bottom of a Styrofoam cooler and fitting it with a grow light. He tipped the cooler upside down over the seedling so the lamp hung from the top and bathed the plant in warm light all night long.

  That would take care of the frost problem. But the morning's brisk wind was also giving Steve pause. He had brought the tray of seedlings outside earlier to begin acclimating them to outdoor conditions—an important step that would help reduce the transplant shock when he put them in the ground in another day or two. He'd set the tray in the middle of his garden for the day and then placed a greenhouse on top of them.

  Already, though, at 8 A.M., the sun was glaring down from a clear blue sky, threatening to cook the plants under the clear plastic. So back into the garden he went, propping up one end of the greenhouse about a foot off the ground to allow more ventilation. From the edge of the patch, he surveyed his work, but the wind was kicking up, beating on the side of the greenhouse and whip-snapping the loose plastic tacked onto the frame. Not good. One year a strong gust of wind had actually lifted one of his greenhouses over the 15-foot-tall cedar trees at the edge of his yard and sent it sailing over to a neighbor's property. He didn't want that to happen again, so he made one more trip into the pumpkin patch, hopscotching over the boards laid across the soft dirt, to anchor the greenhouse frame down with a large paving stone.

  By the second week in May, when most growers around the country should have already had their plants in the ground, complaints about the 1068 Wallace seed were still on the rise. The phone at the Wallace household began to ring as people sought advice on how to rescue their seed or begged for a replacement. Ron and Dick felt bad about anyone who had paid for a 1068 and was unable to sprout it. Ron mailed out several replacements, even though he found it painful to part with his dwindling stock. But, he figured, if the seed didn't break through the top rank this year, then they might not be worth hanging on to, anyway.

  The reputation of the Wallace seed seemed to be going downhill fast as a litany of complaints erupted into a public discussion on the BigPumpkins.com message board. In a string of messages titled "Problems with the 1068," several growers groused that the seed was a dud. "It sounds like there have been a lot of failures at germinating it this year," wrote one Utah grower who'd had trouble with it. "I know that I didn't do anything wrong." Another grower called the seed "a finicky bugger," noting his own difficulties. "The 1068 was worst seed I've germinated so far," wrote a California grower—out of 20 seeds he started, it was the only one that wouldn't sprout.

  Ron read the complaints on the board and silently steamed. He and his dad believed the growers were having problems because they were trying to germinate the 1068 at lower temperatures. Worse, they suspected some were trying to sprout the seed with the despised paper towel method. "For the 1068, it won't work," Ron said. In any case, the criticism didn't seem fair. There were always going to be some seeds that didn't pop—there's a natural and expected failure rate. But a few disappointments were being exaggerated because of all the attention focused on the seed. A lot of top growers had banked on putting a 1068 in the ground that year. Ron estimated there were 106 8
s in the hands of more than 50 growers in 2006, most of whom would be trying to grow it. But some were unlucky, and some just weren't careful enough.

  Ron was willing to try to help anybody who called or e-mailed him privately about a problem. But he resisted posting a defense on the message board. He'd had bad experiences there in the past when other growers—strangers—had taken his comments the wrong way. And he was appalled at some of the pettiness and backbiting he occasionally saw breaking out. "On the computer, everybody's ten feet tall," he observed. "Whenever you put something in writing, it can be interpreted fifteen different ways." But BigPumpkins.com was the official grapevine for pumpkin growers, and Ron worried about the effect all the chatter might have on the reputation of the 1068.

  So Dick tackled the problem. Dick's view of the Internet was entirely different from his son's. He saw it as a chance to reach out to growers across the country and to make a big impact with just a few words. He logged on to the message boards regularly, mostly to dispense advice, respond to questions, and offer encouragement spiced with heavy doses of his cornball humor.

  Dick sprang to the defense of the 1068, reminding the growers that the seed had been responsible for an impressive slate of monster pumpkins in 2005, and had been a big contributor to the Southern New England growers' success that year. He rattled off some of its proud progeny: the 1333 Connolly, the 1312 Sperry, the 1253 Sperry (the 2004 Topsfield Fair champion), and the 1201.5 LaRue (2005 winner of the "Terminator" weigh-off in Oregon). Not to mention, he added, the two pumpkins he and Ron had lost to rot just before the 2005 weigh-off, both estimated to be more than 1,300 pounds at the time of their demise.