On August 1, 13-year-old Harold Harris pollinated some giant pumpkin seeds his grandparents had gifted him, and that he had planted earlier in the season. At the time, he wasn’t sure how large they would grow.
Now, Harold finds himself with two giant pumpkins. The smaller one is 340 pounds, as of a weigh-in this weekend. The larger pumpkin is estimated to be well over 400 pounds, but an exact weigh-in has not been able to take place yet.
Harold has been tracking his pumpkin’s progress by taking daily measurements and plotting growth curves.
“I add up all of the [circumferences], and then I convert that to inches, and then I got a table in the book that shows me what that is equal to for the weight,” Harold explained during a recent interview in his garden. “It’s usually within five per cent [accuracy].”
The pumpkins were grown in a patch of soil at his home in Edgartown, and required careful monitoring, especially in periods of rapid growth.
Harold now estimates the pumpkins’ growth rate to be between four to six pounds per day, but at its peak they were growing about 27 pounds a day.
“I gave it maybe 100 gallons of water per day in the middle of summer, and now it’s maybe 50 gallons,” Harold said. “And every other day I give it some fertilizer in a soil drench.”
He uses drip irrigation and fertilizes the pumpkins with seaweed weekly.
“Once a week I do a soil drench, and sometimes I do a foliar spray,” he explained. “I also soak towels and stuff in calcium and put them on the pumpkin. That’s supposed to help thicken the walls.”
Harold has loved gardening for years, even before his interest in giant pumpkins took hold, said his parents Marty Harris and Emily Reddington.
“He grows figs, he prunes trees, he goes and takes all the adult classes at [Polly Hill Arboretum],” his father said. “He brings down their average student age by a lot.”
Not one to rest on his laurels, Harold is already strategizing for next year, which he think could be even more impressive as this year might be a “skip-year” pumpkin.
“If you get a seed from, say, a 2,000-pound pumpkin, it might only produce a four or five-hundred pound pumpkin,” Harold said. “But the year after that, you might get back up to 2,000 [pounds] using the seeds from the 500-pound pumpkin.”
While some giant pumpkin growers might be interested in the awards or notoriety associated with the discipline, Harold is uninterested, at least for now.
“They’ve got some [competitions], but I think I’m probably just going to wait and carve it,” Harold said.
In October, Harold plans to harvest the pumpkins and put them in the garage for safekeeping. Then, he hopes to carve something special for Halloween.
“I’m going to try to get a giant jack o’ lantern,” he said.
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