BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – You’ve seen them at county fairs and weigh-offs, but what goes into growing giant pumpkins?
Up a dirt road in Springfield lies a pumpkin patch that’s home to some gargantuan gourds – one weighing over 1,500 pounds.
Giant pumpkin grower Wilbur Horton says growing them is no easy task.
“I’m here probably just about every day in the evening checking the vines, checking the plants – it’s like a full-time job, really, if you’re gonna grow a bunch of them,” said Horton.
An electrical engineer by trade, Horton bides the rest of his time in the patch.
“I usually start in early April – start them in the house under grow lights, and at the same time I’m preparing the patch with what we want to mend it with,” he said.
Once in the patch, they’re constantly watered, dried, and covered to keep away pests.
However, growing big pumpkins can come with big problems.
“This one started to grow bad – I was scraping off the rot spot – and it kept getting deeper into the pumpkin. And in this case, you can see all the black spots… it started spreading all over the pumpkin. I had about a dozen or so of those spots. At that point, I knew it was going to go down,” said Horton.
Still, Horton kept plugging along, banking on his other pumpkins to get beyond big.
“It’s a heartbreaker, that’s why I grow so many – I lose a tendency of about half of them will go,” he said.
For pumpkins that do make it through the season unscathed, they’re carefully loaded onto pallets, and it’s off to the weigh-offs across the state.
“It’s completely a weight game, not a beauty game. This one is not the prettiest pumpkin I’ve grown, but it’s a heavy pumpkin,” he said.
Once weighed, the behemoths are brought back or sold – but not before scooping out some seeds for next year.
For any prospective giant pumpkin growers – Horton has some words of wisdom:
“Try it – and once you get the bug, you’ll start trying to get it bigger.”