by Susan Warren
But with many more growers planting the 1068 in 2006, Dick acknowledged a higher failure rate than he would have liked. "I have no real hard evidence as to why this is happening," he wrote. Dick offered the Wallaces' prescription for successfully germinating a 1068, including higher-than-normal heat and a good dose of patience. Even under perfect conditions, the 1068 could be a slow starter, Dick warned, sometimes taking four or five days to emerge, compared to a three-day average for other seeds.
The seed's critics didn't hold the floor for long. Several growers chimed in with 1068 success stories. "Mine came up quickly and in good shape," said a grower in the Appalachian Mountains. A New York grower declared he would pick "a slow, wimpy, sad-looking 1068" over any other healthy seedling. One Ohio grower received a replacement seed from Ron when his first seed failed to germinate, but had to call for help again when the second seed came up looking pale and puny. Ron advised him to give it a shot of seaweed solution, put it under a grow light, then step back and watch it take off. "I'll tell ya, that's exactly what it did," the grower vouched.
Then, Dave Stelts in Pennsylvania called the Wallaces to announce, "The Eagle has landed!" The 1068 seedling Ron had sent via Federal Express had arrived safe and sound. Dave had put it straight into the ground the same day. The Wallaces had handed out all their other spare plants to club members in need. Their own five 1068s were in the ground and growing. Despite the 1068's germination problems, the season looked like it was off to a good start for the Southern New England pumpkin growers.
And then the weather, as weather is prone to do, changed.
On May 15, the day after Mother's Day, the National Weather Service flashed emergency bulletins across New England warning that the region was in for one of the worst flooding events in its history. A four-day deluge already had dropped nearly 15 inches of rain on Massachusetts and New Hampshire, pushing rivers over their banks and swamping neighborhoods. Schools were closed, roads washed out, homes submerged. The governors of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine declared states of emergency. Farther south, Rhode Island and Connecticut were also poised for flooding. Though they were spared the heaviest rains, the five to seven inches they got in four days was close to setting records there too.
The early spring had been so dry that growers had been worried about the prospect of a drought. And then the clouds gathered and the skies darkened and the rain came down. And down. And down. In New Hampshire, which got the brunt of the storm system, some growers were completely wiped out. One grower's pumpkin patch was under two feet of water. Another grower sat in his house and watched the loose dirt of his freshly tilled garden sluice away inch by inch down a hill.
In Rhode Island, water drained off quickly from most patches, doing less harm. The newly planted seedlings were protected inside their greenhouses, safe from the pounding rain, shrieking wind, and sopping mud. But still, there were worries. No one could remember a spring that had been this wet, this long. And the timing couldn't have been worse for the plants. Most growers had just gotten their seedlings in the ground when the rains began rolling through. Even though the plants were dry beneath their covers, they still needed sun to grow.
In a good year, the plants would have been exploding about now, with new leaves bursting forth every day. But the cloudy skies and cool temperatures that came with the storm acted like a brake on growth, putting the plants into slow motion. Growers had difficulty getting into their patches—now quagmires of sucking sludge—to check on their plants. "I stepped into a corner of my garden last night and sunk down one foot into the mud," Steve Connolly wrote to Ron Wallace in an e-mail. "That's never happened before."
In fact, according to the National Weather Service, the New England region hadn't seen torrential rains this severe since 1936. Worse, there was no sign of it being over yet. The forecast called for more rain through the rest of the week, with daily chances ranging from 30 to 90 percent, and only one day showing a possibility of the sun breaking through.
As the storms raged in southern Massachusetts that Mother's Day night, Steve Connolly stepped outside his house in his rubber boots and snapped some pictures of his garden. The lights he had rigged inside each greenhouse to keep his plants warm blazed through the black night, turning the greenhouses into great, glowing lanterns in the darkness. The wind whipped at the plastic covers and the rain beat down in a relentless rhythm.
Growers were glued to television and Internet weather reports, desperate for news of a break in the weather. Every day without the sun was hurting their chances of growing a championship pumpkin, and already, they were running behind. "New England is off to a horrible start," worried Ron. "We're like a prize fighter that got slugged in the face in the first round. We're staggering a bit."
As Ron watched the rain fall, he passed the time calculating the damage. And it wasn't just his pumpkin patch he was worried about. At the country club, the rain was keeping away the golfers who produced a hefty chunk of the club's income during the warm season. In the past 10 days, the club was running 250 rounds below normal. And if the golfers weren't golfing, they weren't drinking at the bar or eating at the restaurant either.
At home, the pumpkin plants were growing, but very slowly. They were a pale green—paler than they should be. Normally, the seedlings already would be lengthening into a long main vine, getting ready to start a blistering pace of growth, which would cause them to outgrow their greenhouses before the second week of June. But by the looks of the plants now, there was no way they'd hit that mark this year. And that was cause for worry.
Everything depended on the growing schedule, and the schedule depended on the weather. If the plants were slow to vine, that could throw off the timing of pollination. Ron figured he had to have a pumpkin started no later than the end of the first week in July to have any kind of shot at a world record. But at this rate, it could be a week or two later than usual before the vines matured enough to produce fruit. If that was so, Ron could kiss his world record good-bye. The whole club would be hurt. Maybe, he began to think, it wasn't going to be their year to shine. While New England drowned, the West Coast had been having glorious weather: warm, sunny days mixed with occasional gentle showers. "The good rain," as Ron called it.
For as much time as they spend researching fertilizer and soil chemistry and pruning techniques, giant-pumpkin growers are ultimately at the mercy of the weather. So if it was New England's year to have lousy weather, and it was the West Coast's turn to earn Mother Nature's smile, then so be it. Ron tried to look on the bright side. This was his first year in the new patch, anyway. Next year the soil would be aged and blended and he'd have a better chance at something special. And for now, the rains weren't all bad. When it was so dry, he'd been worrying he would have to dig his new well deeper. But now it was brimming. And the new grass seed Ron and his dad had sowed to cover the bare ground of their old patch was loving the rain. If they could just get one or two sunny days, the seed would explode out of the saturated earth into a thick, green carpet of rye.
Out in the Wallace pumpkin patch, hunkered under the cover of their greenhouses, the new crop of pumpkin seedlings were shielded from the terrible weather. In fact, other than being behind schedule and a little pale, this was the most robust set of young plants the Wallaces had ever grown. Ron was determined not to get carried away over pumpkins—that was a road that led only to disappointment. But he couldn't help but feel excited by his tough-looking new batch of seedlings: their thick, well-shaped leaves, stout stems, firm posture. He ran the dates through his head again, what needed to happen, when it needed to happen, for him to have a shot. They weren't doomed yet. It might still turn out all right. He just needed the weather to give him a break.
8
The Troubles
MAY HAD DUMPED ROUGHLY three times the normal rainfall on New England, including a stretch when it rained 10 days straight. June was starting out even worse, with bigger storms, heavier rain, and more ferocious winds. A massive
pocket of unstable air was hanging out over the eastern seaboard, generating repeated storms. Such weather patterns can be stubborn; they feed on themselves, creating a cycle of weather that can be difficult to break. The rain had saturated the ground with moisture, and as the moisture evaporated, it saturated the air and then it fell back to the earth. Weather forecasts along the East Coast for June boiled down to two simple words: more rain.
By the beginning of the second week in June, the Wallaces' pumpkin plants were finally beginning to outgrow their greenhouses. Ordinarily, the coldframes would have been removed already, but the plants were lagging more than a week behind the normal pace. At least the shelters warmed up the air and kept the young plants safe from the heavy rains and cold winds that continued to blow through. "It's been just an awful spring," Ron groused. "It's June 8 and this is the second day under sixty degrees. That hasn't happened in fifteen years!"
The day before had been the worst yet, with an unheard-of summer nor'easter barreling in with 50 mile-an-hour winds and five more inches of rain. The storm had begun the night before, and though Ron had checked the weather reports repeatedly throughout the day, the forecasters had predicted only about an inch of rain, and hadn't even hinted at the gale-force winds that had blown all day long. Ron and Dick had staked down the greenhouses securely just in case, tying each corner to steel rods driven deep in the ground, so the plants were protected. But the storm's intensity was a surprise. From his office at the country club, Ron called his father in the middle of the storm to see how the pumpkins were doing, but he didn't go rushing home. He was getting better at letting go. "I can't do a thing about the weather," he said. "What happens, happens."
Ron was more concerned about damage at the country club. "We lost three big tables outside—the umbrellas ripped off and smashed them. That aggravates me because I should have thought of that. And the pool took a ton of leaves and debris. We'll have to work on it for the next two days to clean it out before it can open."
Ron was feeling pessimistic about his plants' world-record chances now. "Once you get off to a slow start, and you're seven to ten days behind, and the weather is still terrible, it's tough to catch up," he said.
If they wanted to reach 1,500 pounds, the hardest part would be getting the pollinations timed just right for maximum growth during July: The plants had to be big enough, and the pollination early enough, for the baby pumpkin to gain 400 to 500 pounds by the end of the month. And the prospects didn't look good. "Maybe if we get a good weather pattern in the next few weeks," Ron said hopefully. "But the way it looks right now, it's going to be very tough for our club to repeat as champs."
By mid-June, most growers had stored away their greenhouses in garages, basements, and barns for another year. Now, the most grueling part of the season was about to begin. Giant-pumpkin plants are high-maintenance creatures, and it requires hours of tedious labor to keep them under control. Pumpkin plants are really ground-crawling vines. From the plant's base, the main vine feels its way forward. During peak growth, a giant-pumpkin vine can grow nearly a foot a day, which is why the vine is said to "run."
Every eight inches or so, on alternating sides, the vine sends up a single leaf, which grows straight up on a stiff, hollow stem. The leaf spreads out horizontally from the top of the stem in a heart shape. When fully grown, a giant-pumpkin leaf can rise three feet from the ground and spread as wide as an elephant's ear. The huge leaves are nature's parasol, shading the roots of the vine to keep them cool and moist, and providing cover to tender new pumpkins as they grow. The vines send down extra roots at every leaf node to anchor the plant more securely and siphon more nutrients from the ground. To encourage even more root growth, many growers bury their vines in the dirt.
"Side vines" branch out opposite each leaf, and more vines sprout from these. As all the vines grow, they put out fingerlike tendrils that grab and coil around anything they can reach—sticks and grass and other leaves. It's the pumpkin's version of a handrail, something to steady itself and support its huge, unwieldy leaves.
Left alone, the plant would turn into a giant, twisting knot of vegetation. The rampant growth drains the plant's energy, reducing the size of its fruit. It's the giant-pumpkin grower's job to prevent that, and to guide the plant into a controlled shape with careful pruning. Growers have developed a number of pruning patterns tailored to their different theories about what will produce the biggest pumpkin. The most common is the "Christmas tree" pattern. The plant is pruned into a triangular shape, with the leading tip of the main vine serving as the pointed top, and the side vines forming branches that spread wider near the base.
Mature pumpkin vines eventually harden into a tough, sinewy rope, but when they're first growing, they are green and brittle. Some vines have an exasperating habit of growing straight up toward the sky. The leading tip of the vine reaches for the sun, curving up from the ground with its cluster of leaf buds pointing forward, looking much like a bright-green dancing cobra. This is a terrifying situation for a pumpkin grower. The slightest puff of wind can blow the vine over and snap it in half. And if the leading tip of the main vine snaps off, it stops growing. A side vine can be trained to be a new main vine, but the chance of it growing a champion is diminished. To safeguard the precious leading tip, growers drive two long sticks into the ground at angles, forming an X over the end of the vine and stabilizing it while gently forcing it closer to the ground.
As the Wallaces' vines began their run across the patch, Ron and Dick spent hours every day pruning and burying and bracing the vines. Though the rains had set them back almost two weeks, Ron was still pleased with the way their 10 plants looked. All the main vines were thick and strong, and the 1068s, which had been slower to get started, now were taking off. "They're coming on like a freight train, leaves as big as a bushel bag," he said.
Though the initial germination problems with the 1068 had faded into history, now Ron was starting to hear complaints from other growers about its seedlings' sluggish behavior. Typically, the 1068 was a tortoise, not a hare. The seed was slow to germinate, the vines slow to run, and the pumpkins slow to take off. But the 1068 had staying power, and it would generally blow past any other plant in the garden by the end of the season. What mattered, after all, was how you finished, not how you started. Even so, Ron was getting e-mails from several growers saying their other plants were outpacing the 1068. And he was getting tired of explaining. "I'm like, 'Okay, if you want to go with an unproven seed from a cross that nobody's heard of, go ahead and pull out the 1068,'" Ron said.
With the garden bursting into its lushest growth of the season, growers weren't the only ones paying attention. The animal kingdom includes a lengthy slate of ravenous varmints with a taste for pumpkin plants. Cucumber beetles devour the leaves and transmit a deadly virus known as bacterial wilt. Squash vine borers, the grublike larvae of moths, burrow into the vines and gorge themselves on the juicy insides. Known among growers as "the dreaded SVBs," dozens of these larvae can infect a single plant, slowly killing it as the vines are hollowed out. And squash beetles, with their gray, shield-shaped armored bodies, suck the juices from the leaves, turning them into crispy shells blackened as if the plant had been burned by a blow torch.
Fortunately, growers had available an assortment of deadly chemicals to dispatch these botanical predators. Competitive pumpkin growers were diligent about spraying their gardens with an array of pesticides tailored to each insect. But there were more difficult pests: furry ones. Mammals were much cleverer than bugs, and they had even bigger appetites.
Rhode Island grower Steve Sperry was worried about deer. His backyard patch was surrounded by woods, and deer often crept into his yard late at night to feast on his landscape plants. He'd recently noticed they had chomped his hosta lilies to a stubble. And deer were also known to have a taste for young pumpkin plants. After getting home from his late shift after 11 P.M. one night, Sperry took a powerful spotlight with him into the backyard and shone it into
the woods around his garden. Several pairs of glittering eyes stared back.
But before he could figure out what to do about the deer, another calamity struck. On Father's Day, Sperry was entertaining his brother and nephew on the back deck of his home, when his brother sat up suddenly and pointed toward the patch. He'd just seen a woodchuck run behind one of the coldframes sheltering the pumpkins near the edge of the woods. Like many other growers that year, Sperry had fallen behind because of germination problems and the cold, rainy weather. He still had his coldframes over his plants, but he'd opened one side to let in the sun and fresh air. Unfortunately, it let in woodchucks too.
A rotund member of the rat family, and also known as groundhogs or "whistle pigs," woodchucks were notorious for nipping off the succulent new growth at the end of a pumpkin vine, terminating the vine's growth. Sperry had noticed a woodchuck sniffing around his garden a few weeks earlier, but his plants were closed up in their coldframes so he hadn't been too worried. He set a trap, didn't catch anything, and then forgot about it. Now the woodchuck was back, and within snacking distance of his exposed plants.
"I looked down and saw it standing up halfway hidden behind the box, with one eye focused on us," Sperry said. He leaped from his chair and ran down to the garden. The woodchuck sprinted away, and Sperry went after it, running between the coldframe and the woods, and then circling around. If he could catch it, he aimed to give it a swift kick into oblivion. But the woodchuck had vanished. And in those few seconds, it had bitten off the tip of the plant's main vine.
Sperry went into combat mode. He borrowed another trap from a friend. It was time for the coldframes to come off the plants, so after removing them, Sperry dashed to the hardware store for some wood fencing to keep out the woodchuck. He was gone 20 minutes, but that was enough time for the animal to pay another visit to the garden and eat a side vine and several leaves off his 1068 plant. Sperry's frustration boiled over. "I thought about purchasing a gun," he said. Instead, he put the fences around his plants and then searched the woods until he found the entrance to the animal's den. He set a trap next to the hole, and two days later he had the woodchuck. His first thought, he confessed, "was to put the pitchfork to it." But his wife convinced him not to kill it. Instead, she put it in her car, drove it several miles away, and let it go.