“By God, if we can get a pumpkin up to a ton, imagine what we can do to somebody’s vegetable crop,” says Stelts, president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which oversees official weigh-offs. “What we are doing will
“By God, if we can get a pumpkin up to a ton, imagine what we can do to somebody’s vegetable crop,” says Stelts, president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which oversees official weigh-offs. “What we are doing will be reflected on the dinner table of America.”
The path to prizewinning pumpkins can be traced, improbably, to Henry David Thoreau. In the spring of 1857, while living in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau planted six seeds from a French variety called Potiron Jaune Gros de Paris (fat yellow Paris pumpkin). He was astonished that fall when one fruit reached 123.5 pounds. “Who would have believed that there were 310 pounds of Potiron Jaune Grosse in that corner of my garden!” he wrote in Wild Fruits.
Thoreau’s hefty harvest was one of the first times a pumpkin of the Mammoth group, which includes today’s Atlantic Giants, made an appearance in North American gardens, according to seed sleuth Amy Goldman, author of The Compleat Squash. All pumpkins are squash, a loosely defined group of species in the family Cucurbitaceae, which includes melons, cucumbers and gourds. The field pumpkin (Cucurbita pepo) is the product of 8,000 years of selective b