Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Welcome to Fascinating Facts and Tantalizing Trivia

A Hartson Dowd Column

October 19, 2007

Fascinating Facts and Tantalizing Trivia:

In the Pumpkin Patch 

What is it about this big, orange fruit that attracts our seasonal attentions?

     There is a field nearby our home --- being harvested now by fiercely moustachioed Sikh gentlemen in turbans --- of ripe pumpkins.  A field of ripening pumpkins --- but will they all be able to find a home before their time is up?  The field is as large and rectangular as a soccer pitch, and the pumpkins sit in  the field, denuded of their vines, dots of orange against the dark roan muck (we have had lots of rain recently).  There are hundreds and hundreds of them, and from a distance they appear to be as uniform as ball-bearings, but up close they are as different from each other as we are --- some as small as volleyballs, some as hefty as big-screen TVs.

      At first glance, they look randomly scattered across the ground, but a closer look reveals a universal pattern:  They seem to exhibit their own form of mass and probability, in that you can see whole galaxies of pumpkins clustering together in some parts of the field, coalescing unto dense masses of orange-ness, as if they were drawn together there by their own gravity, while other parts of the field contain large stretches of empty space sparsely populated by singular pumpkins, the field's lonely planets.

      At any rate, they are a vision in the field, especially when the sun hits them.  The sight of them gives me the same feeling as a flock of snow geese rising in a blizzard of white feathers.  There's wonder, and reassurance, in the sheer uniform bounty.

      At the same time, I worry about all that fruit sitting there.  There seems too much bounty.  Pumpkins have their own biological clocks, running roughly from mid-October to mid-November, and I know there can't possibly be enough jack o' lanterns and pumpkin pies and pumpkin soups and pumpkin muffins and pumpkin fudge and pumpkin cookies and roast pumpkin seeds and pumpkin piccalilli to find gainful employment for all the orange multitudes sitting in all the desolate, mud-clogged fields I see at this time of the year.  As with Christmas trees, or the pumpkin's poorer cousins, zucchinis, I fret that they all might not be able to find a home in this short, month-long window of opportunity before their time is up.

      At the same time, they are not what you'd call a staple of life., despite the pilgrims' propaganda.  Pumpkin pie has always to me tasted vaguely of chalk, despite whichever cook presses it upon me; pumpkin soup is an expediency, not a preference; and roast pumpkin seeds are more trouble than they're worth.  Pumpkins, like in-laws, come with the nagging weight of obligation, no matter how pleasant and agreeable they might appear to be.  A pumpkin sitting heavily on your kitchen table, always begs the question, "What on earth do I do with this thing, other than carve a face in it?"

      On the other hand, I don't feel the same regard for the other players of the vegetable world who sometimes appear in cameo roles in our kitchens.  Parsnips for instance.  Or cabbage, or rutabagas, since I don't even know what a rutabaga is.  I don't worry that they may rot in the fields.  Mostly, I hope they do rot in the fields.

      So why this affinity with pumpkins?

      Size has something to do with it --- you are drawn more to the whale than the snail.

      But I think it's because pumpkins (and here's where we might find the elusive metaphor) most resemble ourselves.  They have a skin as glossy as our own.  They take a punch much like we do.  They're fill-fleshed in their youth then deflate with age, falling in on themselves like an old man's gums.

      But best of all, they are like us in that, given a face, and a light inside, they grin at us in the dark, and we grin back.

WEIGHT, IN GOLD Pumpkins await a weigh-off in Warren, R.I.

Joe Jutras holds the world record.

“Basically, they all came from the Atlantic Giant,” Sue Jutras said, standing in the family’s pumpkin patch in North Scituate, R.I., where her husband, Joe, grew the 1,689-pounder that broke the world record this year.

But he is not satisfied with that achievement. Beautiful orange pumpkins tend to be lighter, with thinner shells; it is their buff-colored, dense-fleshed cousins that usually break the records.

“Joe’s trying to get the best of both,” Mrs. Jutras said. “An orange one that’s heavy.”

Mr. Jutras’s baby, the color of a Creamsicle, had toppled a 1,566-pound mammoth grown by Bill Rodonis, in Litchfield, N.H., which, only 25 minutes earlier, had broken the 2006 record set by a 1,502-lb. giant grown by Ron Wallace in Greene, R.I.

“It was a bittersweet moment,” said Mr. Rodonis, a farmer, of his fleeting victory. “But no one can take that away from me.”

The weigh-off, at the Topsfield Fair in Topsfield, Mass, on Sept. 29, was one of dozens taking place around the country.

“I would think that 2,000 pounds is not out of the question anymore,” said Mr. Jutras, who was taking part in his local club’s weigh-off a week later at Frerichs Farm in Warren, R.I.

Mr. Jutras had donated a 1,000-pound squash, just to be dropped from the air and smashed, to open the ceremonies. Forty-five pumpkins, from classic orange to buff to white, were lined up in a field surrounded by bleachers full of fans, with a bandstand, complete with rock band and pumpkin cheerleaders, with orange wigs, gyrating onstage.

Forklifts trundled each entry to a scale to be weighed, from the smallest orange 142-pound beauty to the thousand-pounders and up.

As they get bigger, these super-size vegetables take on the unfortunate appearance of terribly obese humans, stretched beyond the capacity of their skins. They can be lopsided, collapsed-looking, with flattened bottoms, as if unable to support their weight.

No matter. The bigger the better, in the giant pumpkin world.

“This might be the biggest crowd in the history of the pumpkin growers’ weigh-off,” Mr. Wallace, the club’s president, said into his microphone at the Warren weigh-off.

“For competitive people like myself, the scale is our accomplishment,” he said. “It’s just fascinating to see something grow that big.”

Mr. Wallace said his biggest pumpkin of this year, a 1,470-pounder, is headed for “Late Show With David Letterman.”

“I’m going to get the seeds out,” Mr. Wallace said. “Then they’ll pack it with dynamite and blow it up.” (Last year’s explosion on the Letterman show, viewable at thatvideosite.com/video/3555, is spectacular. In fact, this is something of a subculture; just search at google.com for “explosion” and “pumpkins.”) Last year, Mr. Wallace’s record-breaker sold for $6,000, to Grand Central Terminal.

Mr. Jutras is still waiting to see who bids the most for his record-breaker, which already earned him $5,000 in prize money at Topsfield. He said he could not talk about negotiations.

Mr. Wallace said, “The top carvers in the world will be battling out who gets to carve it.”

But not before Mr. Jutras gets his seeds out, of course. He and others will grow them to see if they can produce massive progeny once more.

“If it doesn’t grow two or three substantial pumpkins, that seed will fall off the map,” Mr. Wallace said. “If they get a handful of 1,500-, 1,600-pound pumpkins, that’s hot seed stock.” (A seed from one of Mr. Wallace’s pumpkins once sold for $850.)

In the winter, these local growers can be found in Mr. Jutras’s woodworking shop, building mini-greenhouses for the pumpkin seedlings, which must be planted in early May, in warm ground.

They start their seeds indoors, toward the end of April, in a sterile mix that has been inoculated with fungi, which set up a symbiotic relationship with plant rootlets, helping them to absorb nutrients and fend off any diseases as the pumpkin plant develops.

The plants go outside into the mini-greenhouses as soon as the baby plant’s first true leaf appears. Once the main vine has grown to the edge of its greenhouse’s wall, it’s time to remove the protection of the house, though lightweight covers made out of spun plastic are usually ready at hand if nights turn cool.

Then comes the mad race to keep up with vines that can grow three feet a day, coursing over the 750 square feet of fertile loam ideally allocated to each plant. The vines are buried, to encourage roots to grow, drawing more nutrients out of the soil to feed only a few favoured fruits to ripen on the main stem.

Each pumpkin plant drinks 60 gallons of water a day. Growers love the kind of hot, dry season they just had — because they can control the water, rather than watch helplessly as a deluge pours down. Too many pumpkins have split because of too much water, bursting a grower’s dream.

Miracle-Gro used to be the magic ingredient. Now, it’s sea kelp and secret ingredients for compost tea. And mycorrhizae — the symbiosis between fungi and plant roots — is on the lips of the champions these days. “We inoculate our potting soil to get the seedlings off to a good start,” Mr. Wallace said. “Imagine your whole garden just one happy campground of mycorrhizae, bringing nutrients to that pumpkin.”

Hart

www.occupytillicome.com