World Must Be Crazy

Iowa grower Don Young shattered California’s record for heaviest gourd with an Atlantic Giant weighing 1,658 pounds today in the 36th-annual World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay.

The massive pumpkin failed to top the world record for a gourd, which was set at 1,725 pounds earlier this month in October. But it was large enough to break the state record of 1,535 pounds, as well as the Half Moon Bay record of 1,528 pounds that had been set in 2008.

Young, 45, drove his pink and green gargantua 2,000 miles from Des Moines to win $9,948 in prize money.

“It wasn’t a world record, but I’m really happy about it,” he said.

Young’s personal best is a 1,662-pound gourd, which he grew in 2007. On Monday, he joined a very small, elite group of North American Atlantic Giant cultivators who have produced more than three pumpkins over 1,600 pounds — an achievement that would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago.

The Half Moon Bay weigh-off, known as the Super Bowl of world pumpkin weigh-offs, drew 59 competitors from California, Washington and Oregon. Young was the first entrant from east of the Continental Divide ever to compete in Half Moon Bay.

Word of his pumpkin spread quickly enough to dissuade three-time Half Moon Bay weigh-off champion Joel Holland from putting his biggest gourd up against Young’s.

“I knew they were bringing a possible world record in from Iowa. I thought I had a better chance to win in Morgan Hill,” said Holland, of Washington state.

Holland wound up taking first place at the Uesugi Farms weigh-off over the weekend in Morgan Hill.

This year’s contest in Half Moon Bay featured the heaviest pumpkins in its history, with 13 gourds tipping the scales at more than 1,000 pounds.

Second and third places went to California growers. Leonardo Urena of Napa took second with a 1,470-pound gourd, and Ron Root of Citrus Heights came
in third with a pumpkin weighing 1,247 pounds.

A local grower made history this year, too. Half Moon Bay farmer Eda Muller, the wife of Mayor John Muller, grew a 1,200-pounder that she’d named Delfina after her granddaughter. It set a record for San Mateo County and beat out her husband’s entry by 13 pounds. The Mullers compete for biggest local pumpkin each year.

“It was hard work,” said Eda. “A lot of other things suffered to raise this pumpkin.”

This year, the couple added innovations such as a big plastic tarp to keep all their pumpkins warm at night. They tried every trick in the book to keep rodents out but had to chase skunks, squirrels and gophers away with a shovel.

The most obsessive grower in the bunch was clearly Young, who runs a tree-trimming service but still found time to raise seven monster pumpkins in his half-acre backyard. Not only did he water them seven times a day, he used five different watering techniques, varying the temperature of the water and the direction from which the water hit the leaves.

Young took leaf tissue and soil samples and sent them to a lab for analysis to make sure they held just the right balance of nutrients. He imported a special fungal extract to coat his pumpkin roots before burying them to stimulate growth.

“It’s getting to be not just as simple as a seed you put in the ground any more. It’s scientific researc,” said Young. “We can adapt on the fly to get the pumpkin what it needs based on lab results.”

The seed was special too, taken from one of Young’s biggest pumpkins and cross-pollinated with the descendant of a previous Atlantic Giant world-record holder.

“We want to grow a big pumpkin, and cross it with a tall pumpkin, and add in the characteristics of a thick pumpkin,” he explained.

Young’s pumpkin almost didn’t make it to Half Moon Bay in time. His pickup truck, toting the gourd on layers of thick Styrofoam, blew a tire along the salt flats in western Wyoming at 1:30 a.m. at one point in his 30-hour trip. He had to borrow water hoses from gas stations to keep his pumpkin moist, throwing a wet comforter across the top.

Young got another surprise when he pulled into Half Moon Bay today at 6:30 a.m.: a caravan of police cars with lights blazing. It was a practical joke engineered by the mayor, who pretended to be an agriculture inspector asking to see Young’s credentials before letting him compete in the weigh-off.

Muller swears he had the Iowa grower going for a minute, but Young said he caught on pretty fast.

“We’re wanted in 19 states,” he joked.

The winning pumpkins will be displayed at the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival, which will be held Oct. 17 and 18 on Main Street.

Largest Pumpkins in the world

Big Pumpkins

Viewed 40643 times by 7880 viewers