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Garden Freaks: Gigantic pumpkins, gourds are stars at county-fair time
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Ricky Holder poses with his giant pumpkin in a photo taken on Sept. 2. The pumpkin now weighs more than 1,150 pounds.
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Published: September 25, 2009
Ricky Holder was at the bottom of a small hill. I waved at him. He returned the gesture. I walked toward him as he peeled a cloth slowly off his prize -- a massive pumpkin.
I could only see his torso from behind it. Eventually, the pale, orange flesh was revealed.
I walked around to the bottom of the pumpkin and observed the concave swoop of the blossom end. The rugged, slightly tattered leaves were as large as elephant's ears, the vines as thick as my arm. I wondered if I should have brought a Geiger counter.
There is something oddly attractive -- even perverse -- about giant vegetables. They are both fascinating and repulsive, freak-show oddities. They are the vegetable equivalent of the snake lady at the carnival. This one looked melted. It was marvelously gargantuan, impossibly obese.
The original seed came from select genes of another giant pumpkin produced by a grower in Massachusetts. Planted in mid-April, the pumpkin plant spent its early months beneath a hoop house. After three weeks, the plastic was removed and the plant started its life in the open. Each node, the point where the vine produces leaves, was buried beneath soil. These nodes can all form roots and feed the plant. The pumpkin vine was feeding off 6,400 pounds of compost.
A pumpkin plant puts out a main vine, and from the nodes of that vine it puts out secondary vines. From the secondary vines it will put out tertiary vines. Vine length is controlled with pruning. Main and secondary vines are pruned at 10 to 12 feet, and tertiary vines are removed. This directs energy to the fruit. The main vine was broken in a storm, and an earlier fruit was cut off at around 100 pounds because of a bad angle on the stem. Each plant ends up with about 500 square feet of growing space.
For a number of reasons, Holder said that pumpkins can abort up to about 100 pounds. After that point it is time to choose your fruit and keep the flowers snipped off to avoid energy being pumped into another fruit.
Holder, 29, keeps track of the pumpkin's progress with something called a Stellflug OTT chart. It calculates the circumference, the stem-to-blossom-end distance, the side-to-side measurement, and it gives an estimated weight.
Holder said that the chart can be plus or minus a few pounds, but with other pumpkins it was within a pound of accuracy. Early this week, this pumpkin weighed 1,157, according to the chart. The week before, it had weighed 1,060 pounds. Two days before that, it weighed 1,035. So it was gaining about 12 pounds a day. Amazingly, the pumpkin was only 70 days old when I visited. It was slowing down from a peak of gaining 38 pounds a day.
This is Holder's first year in competitive pumpkin-growing. His interest was spurred when his wife, Ashley, requested that he grow a Halloween pumpkin last year. It ended up around 80 pounds.
Besides the pumpkin, Holder, a maintenance technician for J and S Cafeterias, is also cultivating an 85-pound watermelon and has a 5-foot gourd hanging from a tree. There is another 480-pound pumpkin in the patch and several others that the average grower would consider tremendous. But here they seem like acorns.
The state record for a pumpkin is held by Sam Lovelace of Sparta at 1,178 pounds.
Holder's good fortune has not come without travail. One week into the growing season the well gave out. He had to dig a 3,500-gallon pond by hand. Holder's snaky system of irrigation delivers overhead misting to the plants, each one receiving about 100 gallons a day.
One potential issue is the integrity of the pumpkin. I felt the need to tip-toe around the massive pumpkin, but Holder said, "Naw, you can't hurt it." He whomped it several times with his fist.
Nearby he has a tripod that will hoist the pumpkin onto the back of his truck, and it's off to the Yadkin Valley Pumpkin Festival in Elkin on Saturday.
Question of the Week
Dear David: Would you provide some advice on growing the following herbs: salad burnet, chervil chives, upland cress, blue borage, curly parsley and French sorrel. I planted them in my vegetable garden, but after two weeks they haven't germinated. I heard that getting the blue borage to germinate can be problematic. Do you think that a crop can still be grown outdoors this fall? Could these herbs be grown indoors during the winter under a grow lamp? -- Michael Brady
Dear Michael: These herbs thrive in the cool season, so your main problem may be soil temperature. Chervil and borage are annuals, parsley and cress are biennials, and chives and sorrel are perennials. Chervil is probably the most difficult. It prefers light to germinate, but needs cool temperatures and resents root disturbance. This means you have to sow it outside on the soil surface, keep it moist and don't cover the seed -- a challenge at best. Chervil and parsley both have a hard seed coat that you can soften by soaking the seed for 24 hours before you sow it. It can easily take more than two weeks to germinate some of these plants. With the exception of the chervil, you should be able to grow all under grow lights.
If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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