I should have guessed that in the world of competitive vegetable growing, there's people whose goal is to produce the biggest pumpkin ever. When this book was written, men aimed to break the record with a pumpkin that weighed over 1,500 pounds (now the world record is 2,624 pounds). This story focuses on a group of giant pumpkin growers in a Rhode Island club, telling the ups and downs that several of them face through one season. The opening and closing chapters, which are mostly about the individuals and their competitiveness, the history of record-breaking giant pumpkins, and the weigh-in that closes the 2006 season, were not that great for me. The writing style tries a little too hard to be enthusiastic and felt awkward in some parts. Nearly stopped reading after chapter three. However the bulk of the book, about how the pumpkins are actually grown and tended, was more to my interest- I can relate as a gardener. Careful selection of seed, testing and prepping the soil, germinating and tending the young plants, setting them out then protecting them anxiously from rough spring weather, pruning and feeding and spraying against pests all summer, fretting over disease and disaster (hungry wildlife, cracked skins, even in one case a suspected fellow grower who jealously poisoned someone's plants!) I'm not a competitive person myself so I don't really understand the fire that makes them work for huge fruit with so much effort- forcing the plants to strain to the max without cracking, rotting or collapsing. I'd rather have something beautiful, useful, or good to eat, than just a right to brag about "mine's the biggest"! But if I ever go to an agricultural fair I'll be sure to stare at prize-winning pumpkins with different eyes now, knowing all that went into getting them that huge size. They do look rather obscene, though.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

Warren, who writes for The Wall Street Journal, enters the world of competitive pumpkin growers, the people who spend up to six months a year growing the massive pumpkins of over 1000 lbs for competitions. She particularly follows the growers of a Rhode Island pumpkin club, and especially a father and son team who have spent years cross-pollinating seeds and coaxing seedlings into huge pumpkins, yet have never won the top prize they covet.
I love seeing the colossal pumpkins and if I lived somewhere things grow, I'd try growing pumpkins, though not these huge monsters that seem to become obsessions. This book celebrates those mostly small-town people who become the top in this field and provides lots of information about the hard work involved. ( )

Good clear reporting couldn't redeem this for me. I just couldn't bring myself to care about the big pumpkins or their caretakers. It makes me feel somehow inadequate when a well-written book fails to move me, but this one left me cold. ( )

A wonderful read. Its a very interesting hobby growing these giant vegetables - half of the year is sitting around jawing about it, spreading a little mulch and waiting for spring. Then there is a huge burst of energy from May till October when the grand weighing-competitions are held and that's that. Back to the club house and bigpumpkins.com for another year.

A young woman, Christy Harp, grew a 1,725lb pumpkin a blue-ribbon prize winner.



Loved the subject, the photographs and the writing. If you like quirky books about real individual people, young women as much as crusty old men, gardening fanatics who are a small and very eccentric part of American culture and will also learn of the secrets for growing giant (inedible) veggies yourself. Sadly for me, since pumpkin are subject to bottom-rot, the moist ground of the rainforest means reading the book is as far it goes for me.


5 May 2011 ( )

This was interesting to me because I'm into Halloween and therefore grow giant pumpkins for my annual Holiday Extravaganza. I'm a lackadaisical gardener, but was successful enough to thrill my neighbors with big gourds. I got the Dill's Atlantic Giant seeds from Lowe's. It was quite easy and fun and I didn't spend my summer hunched over the garden fretting about my produce.

However, this book wasn't really all that. It was repetitious. It referred repeatedly to Big Pumpkin Growing Secrets that it didn't really specify. It was actually quite dull, and I thought it read like a term paper that had been pumped full of spare verbiage to bring it up to page count. If only she had dumped some of the complaining about weather stories and all the "oh no, found a crack in the pumpkin" tellings (and re-tellings) and written about the Half Moon Bay pumpkin festival, or punkin chunkin, or carving contests, or anything, really, this would have been a much better book.

If you want useful facts about pumpkin growing, skip this book and go to Big Pumpkins dot com for the gardener's skinny. If you would like to read a hilarious pumpkin-related book, get a copy of "Extreme Pumpkins." This is a rude and irreverent collection of amusing and scary pumpkin carving ideas that will probably annoy people who only like cutesy stuff. I do a Flaming Pumpkin every year - the photos are awesome and it's a real crowd pleaser. ( )