As Gourd as It Gets
Growing Mammoth Pumpkins Isn't A Pie-in-the-Sky Dream for Competitors

By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 8, 2007

ALTOONA, Pa.

In the company of another 100 or so giant pumpkins, the mammoth gourd doesn't seem quite as freakish as it must have in Arden Fry's vine-covered garden the day before.

Go to a convention of sumo wrestlers, and soon the outsize humans become the norm, and so it was on Saturday as dozens of freshly harvested pumpkins -- some the weight of a horse -- were corralled behind yellow caution tape, awaiting their turn on the scales at the Pennsylvania Great Pumpkin Growers Association annual weigh-off.

So we suspend disbelief and have a chat with the 31-year-old Fry about raising the beast at his side as if it were a garden-variety cucumber or tomato. The talk is of soil tests, manure, pH adjustments, all run-of-the-mill gardeners' chat, but the pretense unravels when Fry starts talking about August.

This is the month when the already seriously oversize fruit morphs into the star of "Little Shop of Horrors." The plant's searching vines grow a foot a day, the roots plunge deeper into the muck soil, and the creature needs to suck up 100 gallons of pure stored rainwater every day. If the vine is healthy, the lone fruit puts on 40 pounds or more a day. This is the truly eerie part: "Studies show," says Fry, "that 90 percent of the growth occurs at night."

The hand, which was petting the fluted monster, moves away.

Often, the fruit swells so fast that moisture seeps from the stem end, portending rot. Or it simply bursts like the fat man in the Monty Python sketch who had one morsel too many.

"Once it splits and gets air in it, it'll go down in a few days," says Tom Wright, a 60-year-old grower from Frenchville, Pa. If you want to retrieve the seeds, "it's like sticking your head into a garbage can." Or a dumpster, perhaps: Wright entered a pumpkin that weighed 563 pounds, a respectable effort 10 or 15 years ago, but an also-ran in today's extreme environment.

As about 100 pumpkin growers, fans and buyers look on, two forklift operators ferry the gourds on pallets to two industrial scales. They are lowered in specially made harnesses, and pumpkins that exceed 1,000 pounds, half a ton, are given a polite round of applause and the growers a T-shirt.

The governing body of this wacky pursuit, the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, calls it a sport and a hobby, but the pastime is now a genuine subculture of North America. And a perfect one, as it pairs a continent blessed with optimum conditions for squash-growing with a New World optimism that anything is possible with effort and method.

Arden Fry's colossus weighs in at 1,105 pounds, netting him fourth place in the Pennsylvania event. His wife, MaryJo, earned third place with a gourd that, though smaller and more misshapen, is 14 1/2 pounds heavier. The winner, however, is 15-year-old Nicole Hilstolsky, of Wyoming, Pa., with a squash that looks like a cantaloupe from Mars and weighs 1,272.5 pounds. The novice grower attributes her victory to "luck."

Her father, John, is a seasoned grower who gave his daughter a killer seed and let her get on with it. Nicole, incredulous at her win, wipes tears of joy from her eyes.

She has beaten not only the Frys, but also the two leading experts in great pumpkin growing in Pennsylvania, Larry and Gerry Checkon, a couple from Northern Cambria who this year arrived with three pumpkins, smooth, salmon-colored fruits the heaviest of which weighs 1,212 pounds. Between them, the Checkons have produced two world champions, the latter weighing in two years ago at 1,469 pounds. Larry and the Pumpkin won a spot on Martha Stewart's television show. She seemed genuinely interested in how to grow such a monster, he says.

Giant fruit and vegetable growing, which began in Victorian England, has been a hobby on this side of the Atlantic for more than a century. But the modern extreme movement can be traced to a Nova Scotia farmer and pumpkin hybridizer, Howard Dill, who developed a seed in the 1970s that became known as Dill's Atlantic Giant. Most of the giant pumpkins grown today derive from this variety.

The growers defy stereotype. Here, in the sunbaked blacktop of a big-box parking lot, you find a doctor, two nurses, a physical therapist, an electronics technician, farmers, retirees and the unemployed. Most of the hobbyists are men. Children and pensioners enter their fruit. This is mostly a rural pursuit, but not exclusively. In his suburban garden in Erie, Tom Adams, 71, took down five trees and removed the back lawn to grow pumpkins. He's been doing it for seven years and arrives with his fiancee, Barbara Cuciak, with two pumpkins in the back of his white pickup truck. He comes in ninth, "and I'm very happy."

Ask for the motivation, and the general response is that gardening is a stress reliever, although this particular cultivar seems a stress producer, what with the inability to ever vacation in August and the need to watch worriedly over rot and dehydration.

Press the entrants more, and they say they are competitive. And, there is a tantalizing record out there at the end of some future vine: the world's first one-ton pumpkin.

Larry Checkon says he "ran some numbers" five years ago, looking at the previous 20 years of records, and figured out that the worldbeaters were growing at a rate of 4.5 percent a year. "At that rate, we should hit one ton in two or three years," he says.

Pumpkins were never designed by nature to be this big. The super-sizing of squash is due to three factors: seed selection, refined growing techniques shared in books and on the Internet, and the fact more people are getting into this hobby. There are more pumpkin competition sites each year and more entries at each one, says Marvin Meisner, an organizer of the Altoona event, one of 49 in the United States and Canada. On Saturday there were also contests in New York and Iowa; in the latter, the top specimen set a state record -- of 1,662 pounds -- but fell short of the world record, set just a week ago by Rhode Island grower Joe Jutras, whose baby tipped the scales at 1,689 pounds.

The pedigree of every super-size pumpkin is known, and can be traced back for generations with as much precision as bloodlines in thoroughbred racehorses. In Altoona, the winning pumpkin traces its lineage to a pumpkin that the Hilstolskys grew to 878 pounds last year and to a 1,333-pounder grown by Steve Connolly of Sharon, Mass., the year before. Seeds can sell in online auctions for hundreds of dollars, but most are either traded between growers or donated to clubs that distribute them as a membership service.

Typically, a grower will cross-pollinate two varieties by hand in a carefully controlled procedure, says Arden Fry. This occurs around Independence Day once the vines have begun to bloom. One vine can end up covering 900 square feet, and one of the recurring chores of summer is burying the vine tips to promote root growth that will direct moisture and nutrients to the one fruit that is allowed to develop. (All the other blossoms? Pinched away.) The gourds are shaded with tarps to prevent the rinds from hardening; if they're kept soft, the innards can grow with less restriction.

It is rare to find growers tending more than four pumpkin vines, not just because of the real estate needed, but also because of the time. Meisner, organizer of the Altoona event, would spend an hour a day watering two pumpkins. He knows one guy whose 10 pumpkins required 60 hours of coddling a week.

The pumpkins themselves are edible -- grower Galen Helsel says one segment of a 610-pounder he grew made 85 pies -- but they are also undeniably ugly. Weight and gravity conspire to produce grotesque distortions. Few have the brilliant deep orange color one wants in a pumpkin. You might get one that is an even pale orange, but others come in morbid shades of pale green and gray.

"Big and ugly," says David Nalls, who runs a farm stand in Berryville, Va. "Who wants to see a big and ugly pumpkin?" He is in the parking lot buying up some of the prettier but smaller orange pumpkins, weighing just a few hundred pounds. He's eyeing 16 that will either be displayed at his farm stand as an attraction or sold to businesses, hotels and residents in the Washington area who are willing to shell out $500 or more for a gesture of Halloween one-upmanship. As he is explaining this, a forklift delivers another Jabba the Hutt look-alike to the scales. "That's an ugly pumpkin right there."

The pumpkins may be grotesque, but the camaraderie they engender brings a wholesome slice of life to the Alleghenies. That, says Lew Yohe, 73, of Pittsburgh, is "what it's all about."