Giant pumpkin growers, mic-ed up: genetics, vegetative growth stage, and setting fruit

This is Serious Grower Podcast.

I am Anna.

I'm an entomologist.

I'm a scientist.

And I am using this podcast to talk to all kinds of growers and eaters who are serious about their farms, their gardens, their local food systems.

And I'm asking, how can science help? This week I have two co-hosts who I will introduce shortly, but this summer I have been rather lucky to be a bit of a voyeur, a bit of a hanger-on, an honorary member of the New Hampshire Giant Pumpkin Growers Association.

this association gets together rather frequently throughout the year to share information on how to grow record-breaking pumpkins have you seen these oh my goodness they are huge and you would be hard-pressed to find more serious growers than these giant pumpkin growers so this has been a real treat for me and it has been so much fun I'm gonna make a bit of a series here because I think you will be just is delighted by their willingness to share information, their willingness to work together through this process.

And it is very competitive.

Stay tuned for the competition.

You're going to witness this yourself because I've been making up a couple of experts during several meetings and apologies for some of the audio as we're always going to be outside.

And we are sometimes going to be in a big group of fellow enthusiasts.

So as we work through the season, you'll get to hear how these folks talk to each other, their attention to detail, the lingo, the slang, and you'll experience the heartache and the successes.

You may even catch the fever and want to start growing these things yourself.

So you're going to learn how to do that too.

So a giant pumpkin is is a large squash cultivar atlantic giant and this is in the species curbida maxima given the right genetics and the right growing practices and a lot of luck these pumpkins can weigh in at thousands of pounds the world record is a staggering 2819 pounds during periods of the growing cycle these plants these pumpkins can put on as much as 50 pounds of weight a day You can literally see these things getting bigger.

It's amazing.

There's obviously an art and a science to this elite level of growing.

We know a lot about how to grow these things through shared information, through growing associations like the New Hampshire Giant Pumpkin Growers Association.

Wherever you are, I guarantee you can find a similar association.

But there is not a ton of research.

Nearly all of the research dollars devoted to studying pumpkins is devoted to commercial vegetable production, applied research that improves production of food crops mostly, and therefore benefits everybody.

So you might be thinking to yourself, yeah, that kind of makes sense.

It might be a little frivolous to spend public funds on giant pumpkins, but by the end of the series, we may find ourselves asking not what science can do for the giant pumpkin, but what can the giant pumpkin do for science? I am getting a little ahead of myself because we should probably start from the beginning with what we know about the genetics of these pumpkins and what we know about the seeds.