Weird Island

35. GIANT PUMPKINS: And the RI Grower Who “Squashed” World Records

Episode Summary

In 2006, Rhode Islander Ron Wallace grew the first 1,500 lb. pumpkin--something no one thought was possible. Then in 2012, he became the first person in the world to grow a pumpkin weighing 2,000 lbs. Now his goal is to be the first to grow a 3,000 lb pumpkin… Hear about what it takes to grow a giant pumpkin, then try for yourself! You can actually buy seeds from Ron Wallace's 2K+ lb. pumpkins at WOW Wallace Organic Wonder.

Episode Notes

Hear about what it takes to grow a giant pumpkin, then try for yourself: Giant Pumpkin Seeds Wallace's Whoppers

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

In the spring of 1857, naturalist, writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was living in Concord, MA, spending his time reflecting on living simply in harmony with nature. He read about the lives of plants and kept detailed observations of the fluctuations of the depths of Walden Pond, noted the days certain birds migrated, and wrote about how fruit ripened over time.
And then one day he received a packet from a contact in France. Scrawled on the packet were three French words that translated to “Fat Yellow Pumpkin,” and inside were six seeds. Thoreau planted those seeds in a corner of his garden and waited and watered and watched. “A little mysterious hoeing and manuring was all the Abracadabra-presto-change that I used,” he wrote. And yet, like magic, something began to grow.
Of the six seeds, only two came up. One sprouted four average sized pumpkins, each weighing 40-50 lbs. But the other produced just one, massive pumpkin, weighing in at 123.5 lbs.
Thoreau was thrilled. He brought the pumpkin to the county fair and sold it to a man who planned to sell each seed for ten cents a piece. He simply couldn’t believe that something so huge had grown in his garden. He wrote, “the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure chest. Here you can dig not gold, but the value which gold merely represents.”
And others were probably amazed as well. Because it’s possible this was the first time a giant pumpkin had made an appearance in a garden in North America. And who doesn’t love a giant pumpkin?
But even though that pumpkin in 1857 might have set a North American record, it certainly wasn’t a world record. People in England and France were growing pumpkins that exceeded 200 lbs. But there really wasn’t a competitive circuit for giant pumpkins yet. That wouldn’t really become a thing for another 30 or so years, until a man from Ontario named William Warnock produced a 365 lb pumpkin worthy of being displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair. That pumpkin set the stage for Giant Pumpkins that would one day weigh more than 2,000 lbs.
I’m Sara, and you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny, little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’m going to be telling you about some very large, record-setting pumpkins grown right here in Rhode Island.
William Warnock, that man from Ontario with the pumpkin at the Chicago World’s fair, he was a pretty big name in competitive pumpkin growing. He actually continued to beat his own records for the largest pumpkin in the world until 1904, when he grew the first pumpkin to weigh over 400 lbs. To be exact, it weighed 403 lbs. And that record wasn’t broken until 1976, 72 years later. That’s when competitive pumpkin growing started to go through some changes.
And those changes all started with genetics. Just like we saw with Thoreau, you need the right seeds to get started. And in the 70s, a man named Howard Dill started to experiment with crossing different varieties of pumpkins together to isolate the best characteristics. Of course, size was the big thing he was looking for, but color and toughness of the skin were important to him, too. And after years spent experimenting, Dill patented his own seed--the Atlantic Giant Pumpkin--in 1979, which became the grandparent of all giant pumpkins grown today.
Suddenly, pumpkins exploded. Records were being beaten left and right. Dill grew a just-under 500lb pumpkin in 1981. Three years later, someone beat that with a 612 lb pumpkin. Five years later, there was a 755 lb pumpkin, and just a year later there was an 816 lb pumpkin.
Then, in 1996, a husband and wife pair grew a pumpkin that weighed in over 1,000 pounds. And that record-setting pumpkin won them 50,000 dollars.
So, clearly genetics are hugely important in growing massive pumpkins. But, I think genetics might go beyond the pumpkin seeds to the growers themselves.
My name is Ron Wallace and I've been growing pumpkins since my dad started in 1982.
Ron Wallace is a grower from right here in Rhode Island, and both he and his dad have set North American and World Records for some monstrous pumpkins.
I started getting involved around 1985 or 86 was my first year growing and what my dad and we've been doing it together pretty much competitively ever since then.
How the pumpkins started really is my dad's from upstate New York and that's kind of one of the birth places of giant pumpkin growing, Canada or in upstate New York, and so he always, you know, had a vegetable garden, saw it in a magazine about big pumpkins. And that's how that's how it all started.
After that 1,000 pound pumpkin in 1996, the next logical goal was to be the first to grow a 1,500 lb pumpkin. And Ron was the one to do exactly that.
In 2006 I was the first grower to grow the world 1st 1500 pound pumpkins, which they thought that wasn't possible. And then 2012 I followed up with the world 1st 2000 Pound Pumpkin at 2009 pounds and that really set the bar for the hobby
Incredibly, it took 92 years to go from that 403lb record holder in 1904 to the first 1,000 lb pumpkin. But then it only took another 16 years to tack on another 1K lbs for a pumpkin over 2K lbs. And Ron holds Guinness World Records for both his 1500lb and 2000 lb pumpkins.
So, I had to know. What does it take to grow a pumpkin that big? I asked, but I figured there would probably be some secrets Ron wouldn’t want to share. But he told me there are no secrets. Because secrets are the enemy of everyone’s success.
You gotta start with the genetics of the seeds and these seeds have been bred. You know, since the late 70s and it just shows you, you know, giant pumpkin growers around the world--and this a worldwide hobby that people compete in --that we're all working together. There's very few if any, secrets. 95% of the growers are very open about what they're doing. If somebody does well, we share our success stories, so we’re all working together. So it's a great network. It shows what what you can do working together because the genetics that we made on the pumpkins have made it possible to grow pumpkins 2000 pounds and of course the current world record stands at 2703. And that's only happening from people working together. So the big way to do it, you know, is it genetics, those seeds.
Growers trade and sell seeds from their giant pumpkins, and if you go online to buy seeds, you’ll see them listed with their genetic information. The seller will list the weight of the pumpkin the seed came from, the name of the person who grew it, the year it was grown, the female plant that was planted to begin with and the male plant that was used to pollinate the female. Growers want to share information, because aside from the genetics themselves, this sharing of learnings has probably had the biggest impact on the ability to grow bigger and bigger pumpkins.
When the Internet you know started to really take hold, everybody had a PC at home in the 90s when I started. You know, when I got my first computer, you know, I just went, you know, head first in research, development and sharing information. You know this. You know websites like mine and other websites on the Internet where all we do is share information.
And something Ron’s site shares a lot about is the importance of soil composition.
And then you have to work on your soil. You know they require copious amounts of organic matter. You know you know balanced compost and nutrients and you know fertilizers. All day sun. You know, a lot of potassium because pumpkins love potassium. They love water.
When it comes to the soil, Ron actually revolutionized competitive growing when he started experimenting with microbes in the soil that allow the plants to obtain nutrients. This is something that was historically only applied in limited capacities in agriculture before then in emergency cases, like if a wildfire devastated an area. Some government agencies would spray something called mycorrhizal fungi on seeds or in the soil to improve the likelihood trees would survive and grow. This fungi actually colonizes roots and forms a symbiotic relationship with the plant that provides increased water and nutrient absorption. And Ron saw an opportunity to expand that use of soil organisms to grow crops, like Giant Pumpkins.
You know when we first started out soil scientists and people would look at giant pumpkin roses sort of like a PT Barnum, a freak show, and now they come to us for questions. Hey, you know we're looking at our soil biology. What do you think? Do we need luxury capacity on nutrients? What do you think? Do we have too much? So it's it's really turned around with a lot of these organizations and these sectors of agriculture.
Once the soil is just right, the pumpkins need water.
They love water. This past season we had way too much water. You know it's really a bad year for growing because of all the rain, but on a normal summer during peak growth, these pumpkins have the ability to do 50 lbs or more a day. Uh, so they require about 100 gallons of water per 1000 square foot a day during the summer. During hot dry stretches.
And then, there’s the space required for a pumpkin to grow.
Uh, you know, there’s growers now, you know, not all growers are growing to win the weigh-off. They just love to grow big pumpkins for their family and they’re growing in as little as 150 square feet and growing pumpkins 500 to 1000 pounds, which is amazing to think that you can push out that big a pumpkin in that small an area. You know growers competing to win it all, they generally their square footage for one pumpkin is 800 to 1200 square feet.
So, you’re starting to get the picture that these pumpkins, they’re a lot of work!
There certainly are. I grow about 4 giant pumpkin plants and I’ll do between 30 and 40 hours a week on those four plants, watering, weeding, fertilizing, buring vines. Because you kinda just don't plant the plant or the seed in the ground and just water. You have to really manipulate the vines as they grow and bury them so they can withstand the wind. You know there's a lot of more things bad he can go wrong with them than good, I mean, you have to watch out for your woodchucks, deer. You know, a good windstorm will take you out of business.
And I imagine all of this is pretty stressful, because you’re placing a bet on a relatively small number of pumpkins. This is because a pumpkin plan might normally grow 4-6 pumpkins. But, once pumpkins get to be about the size of a volleyball, growers will cut back to just one single pumpkin to allow it to get all the nutrients. Maybe that’s what happened to Thoreau’s pumpkins - we saw that one plant sprouted multiple, smaller pumpkins, while the other sprouted one massive pumpkin. But when that’s the case, if something goes wrong with that one pumpkin, it can be devastating.
And there seem to be more and more opportunities for things to go wrong in recent years. More storms, more rain, more wind.
I've seen that global warming impact here has been higher risk of storms and tropical storms. And the last two years. My, you know, giant pumpkin plant with the leaves 4 foot tall? They don't take sustained winds and wind gusts up to 40-50 miles an hour. It just shreds the plant and you will not reach your capability of what you're gonna grow.
So, in the past few years, Ron’s pumpkins haven’t set any world or national records. Today, the record holder is out of Italy - with a 2,703 lb pumpkin. But, Ron’s not giving up.
Yeah, well, my goal is to be the first to 3000 pounds. And you know, and another world record. I have two of them and three World Championships. And I would like to get another. It's kind of need a lot of things to come together for that to happen, but I've seen things in my program over the last couple of years that leads me to encouragement that if I got, you know, the right seed, you know because we’re using specific seeds each year, and you know if a pumpkin has anywhere from 2 to 500 seeds, not all are gonna act the same. So you gotta get a little fortunate with your seed choice. And if I can get the right weather, you know, they definitely know I have the ability to do it. But, uh, you know a few different things have to come together.
Truthfully, no one knows what the limit might be. Some mechanical engineers have actually tried to estimate how big a geometrically perfect pumpkin could get by placing pumpkins of various sizes in a vise-like instrument and subjecting the fruits to pressure until they crack. These force measurements resulted in an estimate that a perfect pumpkin, in a perfect world could get as large as 20K pounds. So, maybe Ron’s goal of the first 3,000 lb pumpkin is actually conservative?
All of this year’s pumpkins have been weighed, and pumpkin season is just about over. So, what exactly happened with all of this year’s giant pumpkins? I imagined you could make a record amount of pumpkin pies, but it sounds like that actually isn’t the best use of these pumpkins. Because they contain more water than your typical garden variety, they’re not super tasty. But these giants serve other purposes.
Uh, you name it! You know people will reach out from all over for them. You know my 2201 that I grew this year is currently at the Botanical Gardens in New York City. Uh the Roger Williams Spectacular here I I helped the guys get all the giant pumpkins for the event down there. I had all mine on national TV before, you name the shows, you know, pumpkin growers have been on them. Casinos are big. Yeah, they just live a famed after life. Like noting will draw attention. Stop traffic on bring a smile to people's faces like a pumpkin will.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m actually thinking of trying my hand at growing a giant pumpkin next year. Ron made it sound genuinely thrilling.
I mean if you even, uh, you know somebody just starting out can experience a pumpkin growing 15 to 25 pounds a day. And to go out and see that size growth every day gets everybody excited.
If you also want to try your hand at growing a giant pumpkin, you should actually get started now! Prepare your garden this fall so it’s ready for the growing season next spring. And you can visit Ron’s website, Wallace Wow.com - or visit Wow Wallace Organic Wonder on facebook to get everything you need to get started, including a packet of Wallace's Whoppers - which are the seeds from Ron’s giant pumpkins that you can grow yourself. Who knows, you might end up with an award winning pumpkin on your hands!
And as Thoreau said, even if it’s not prize winning and you’re not digging up actual gold, you might find something the value which gold merely represents.
Thanks for listening! And thanks to Ron Wallace for joining me and sharing his love of pumpkins with the world. If you liked this episode, please leave a rating or review, or you can send me a note at Weird Rhode Island at Gmail.com. And if there’s a topic you’d really like to hear about, let me know! See you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!