COLCHESTER — Attendees at Sam Mazza’s Farm scurried out of the way as a forklift trudged to an awaiting crane — metal and gears groaning as the lift struggled beneath the weight of its freight. The crane lugged the load to a massive red scale, the audience waiting to hear the judge’s official measurement.
The cargo: James Beane’s 1,814-pound giant pumpkin — a record-breaking fruit that took first prize at Sam Mazza’s annual giant pumpkin weigh-off.
The Vermont Giant Pumpkin Growers have been hosting the weigh-off at Sam Mazza’s for 19 years, inviting growers to battle for the title of heavyweight fruit champion.
It’s Christmas Day for a pumpkin grower.Ron Wallace, three-time world champion giant pumpkin grower
“You can cut the tension with a knife because people are so excited,” said Ron Wallace, a three-time world champion grower who was the first person to grow pumpkins over 1,500 and 2,000 pounds.
“This is years and years of effort for a lot of people, so it’s great to see everybody because they’re excited to look at pumpkins and talk about pumpkins. It’s Christmas Day for a pumpkin grower,” he said.
The weigh-off follows the rules ordained by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, the international governing body on all things giant plants. All entries must be free of rot and any holes or cavities greater than three inches. If the pumpkin has more than two damaged areas, the plant is automatically disqualified.
Sam Mazza’s weigh-off is the only GPC-officiated event in Vermont, and many growers said that just having a pumpkin worthy of judging is an accomplishment.
“It’s a big deal to even get one here,” said Lisa Gates, who's been growing for seven years. “A lot of people aren’t so lucky. Theirs rotted or blew up, so we’re all happy to just get one to the scale even if it's not the biggest.”
The Commonwealth also determines what counts as a pumpkin based on color. The crops at Sam Mazza’s ranged from deep green, cream mottled with white and classic orange. By Commonwealth rule, entries with traces of orange were entered as pumpkins, and any whose full colors were green, gray or blue were entered as giant squash to be judged separately.
In addition to size, the pumpkin with the roundest shape, brightest orange color and overall best aesthetic is bestowed the Howard Dill award. Michael and Tracy Cole’s 940-pound pumpkin took that prize on Saturday.
The award’s namesake pioneered growing giant pumpkins back in the 1980s in Nova Scotia, Canada. Dill bred and patented seeds for the Atlantic Giant Pumpkin — the most commonly used seed in competitions.
Wallace said that the 80s were a trial-and-error period for early growers.
Though Dill made seeds more accessible, growers were still “in the dark,” he said. Wallace’s family started growing in 1989 and originally gave it up after a year of little success.
“The hobby was a lot different pre-internet,” he said. “We had some pumpkins, but they weren’t big, just a few hundred pounds. There were so many things that we didn’t know we were doing wrong.”
The door was opened when Don Langevin published the first edition of his book, How-to-Grow World Class Giant Pumpkins, in 1993.
The book is hailed as the all-encompassing codex for pumpkins, teaching backyard gardeners how to compete with world-class growers. Many Sam Mazza attendees attributed part of their success to Langevin’s book.
Software Engineers Ken Desrosiers and John Deary started growing pumpkins in 1998 and were immediately hooked. The two would scour the internet for growing tips but would come up empty-handed. In 1999, they combined their passions and developed the website BigPumpkins.com — an online forum with live discussion rooms, grower diary entries and updated weigh-off data.
“Don’s book was the early going and then BigPumpkins.com took it mainstream,” Wallace said. “Now the Facebook groups are quite popular, and so now we have the gathering of information and the networking that wasn’t available in the early days.”
Many consider growing a giant pumpkin nerve-wracking, hard work. The plant needs approximately 600 gallons of water every day, and appropriate fertilizers vary depending on soil types.
This season has been super dry with the drought, and I was very lucky to have a very good well.Lisa Gates, giant pumpkin grower
Adverse weather conditions, crop disease and pest infestation threaten to ruin a season, too.
“Trying to keep them watered so they keep growing is the challenge,” Gates said. “This season has been super dry with the drought, and I was very lucky to have a very good well.”
Barry LeBlanc, a champion pumpkin grower from New Hampshire, said that a giant pumpkin plant can put on 50 pounds and a foot of length every day at peak growth, a crucial time for a pumpkin’s success.
“That peak growth period is most likely for a pumpkin to split,” he said. “The blossom tends to be the thinnest part of the structure, and if you get a lot of rainfall or the pumpkin’s growing too fast, it’ll split right at the cavity there.”
LeBlanc won the Deerfield Fair giant pumpkin weigh-off last year with a 2,457-pound pumpkin and attributed his success to proper maintenance.
Left unattended, LeBlanc said that a giant pumpkin will turn into a “twisted jungle of vines.” The vines can strangle the plant or dry up when left in the air, preventing the pumpkin from absorbing water and nutrients. This can lead to disease or soft spots that might cause the pumpkin to cave in.
To avoid this, pumpkin growers prune the plant — snipping excess vines that might hinder growth. Growers create a Christmas tree pattern, chopping off tertiary vines completely and trimming the secondary vines sprouting from the left and right of the main stem. This helps the pumpkin root deeper into the ground and grow more symmetrically.
“Most of us have big, long pruners on the end of a pole so that we don’t have to walk in there and step all over the plant,” LeBlanc said. “You don’t allow any of that extra growth to occur, and that’s really the trick to grow with these plants.”
More growers are seeing numbers close to three thousand pounds — the world record being Travis Gienger’s 2,749-pound pumpkin, “Michael Jordan.”
Many growers said that the hope of going bigger than the year before is one thing that keeps them coming back.
Another is the sense of community. At Sam Mazza’s, growers from states like New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire journeyed to Vermont to meet with old friends. Many of them said they’re planning on travelling to Saratoga, New York to support their friends there, too.
“It’s just a really tight knit group of people,” said Jenna Baird, president of the Vermont Giant Pumpkin Growers. “It’s not just about growing. It’s about getting to know a lot of really great people.”
The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
