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Now THAT’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!

Sep
2
2010

Everyone I have talked to this year talks about how early their vegetable gardens have been this year, what with the heat wave in early July and another in late August.

To most of us that means picking tomatoes faster than we had anticipated or planting more garlic to keep the slugs and other critters out of the garden.

But to Fred Hain of London the quick maturation of his crop this year could make the difference between a winning pumpkin or a whole lot of pumpkin pie!  It seems one of his pumpkins was well on its way to eclipsing his personal record for weight when it grew too fast and split under its own weight – at a mere 900 pounds!

Mr. Hain is a Hall of Fame member of The Giant Vegetable Growers of Ontario, a group dedicated to the growing of giant vegetables for the purpose of competition, display, sales and enjoyment. And at the GVGO they take their horticulture seriously, using giant seed, good dirt and a fertilizer of seaweed, fish, molasses and homemade soil soup to make their veggies grow higher, heavier and hopefully not too much faster.

Looking at the 1236 pound squash and 134 inch long gourd (the GVGO eschews metric!) makes you wonder what size of a dinner plate you can expect at a GVGO function! But the grandaddy of them all is Phil and Jane Hunt's 1678 lbs. Canadian record pumpkin at Port Elgin Pumpkinfest 2009 . Now THAT's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!

But not to worry about Mr. Hain! Even if his pumpkin's won't match that 1678 pound behemoth, he still has his four pound tomatoes, 8 foot gourds and two storey sunflowers!

Pumpkinfest 2010 runs October 2nd in Port Elgin.

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The Teeswater.Ca Team are a group of people interested in providing local news of interest to everyone without needing the instant gratification of their name in (cyber)print.

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This work by Mark W. Law & The Teeswater.Ca Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.