Competitive pumpkin growing: sport and addiction

It's the moment of truth after months of sheltering, feeding, pruning and watering to grow one huge pumpkin.

A team of men eases a ponderous, pale orange ball of flesh into a harness. A forklift groans as it hoists the gourd. It rises slowly like the "Great Pumpkin" of Linus van Pelt's imagination, up to the hay cart that serves as a weighing stage.

Walt and Brad Perham, a Bothell father-and-son team who carefully nurtured this pumpkin of proud lineage, pace back and forth, unable to hide their anticipation.

The huge pumpkin, last of 18 weighed on a crisp fall Saturday in the Pacific Northwest Giant Pumpkin Growers club event at Central Market in Shoreline, hits the scale. There's a pause as the digital readout registers the weight. Finally it flashes the number: 1,467 pounds, a state record. For now.

A cheer erupts from the crowd of fellow growers and spectators as Walt and Brad grin ear to ear and share a victory hug. They pose for photos, proud as new parents, with their prizewinner.

This is competitive pumpkin-growing, and its practitioners call it alternately a sport and an addiction.

At events this month across the country, growers are weighing off their biggest. The hulking pumpkins look like beanbag chairs dropped from the sky with flat, wide bottoms and round tops.

Their stems are as wide as a farmer's forearm. They range in color from off-white to pale yellow to waxy green (but too much green is the mark of a giant squash, which competes in a different category).

These pumpkins aren't much good for pie. "They're just a big bag of water," says grower and emcee Rollie Kroeger. But the winners take home substantial cash prizes.

The Perhams scored $2,175 for their big beauty. It will grace the parking lot at the Central Market, which sponsored the event, along with the growers club.

Top growers, known as Heavy Hitters, can make thousands more selling their seeds and the pumpkins themselves as over-the-top Halloween decorations for homes and businesses.

Like most of the growers competing Saturday, the Perhams aren't farmers by trade. Walt, 56, manages a manufacturing company in Woodinville. Brad, 32, is a radiology technician at Overlake Hospital Medical Center.

They started growing six years ago after Brad encountered giant pumpkins at the Puyallup Fair. They tilled up Walt's lawn — a single pumpkin plant can easily occupy 750 square feet — and grew a 600-pounder, then a 1,200-pounder and, now the record-setter. They keep coming back each year to beat their best.

"Fourteen hundred is such a high benchmark," Brad Perham said. "I just hoped to ever reach 13. Fifteen is definitely the next benchmark we want to hit."

They have their soil tested annually and follow detailed feeding and watering schedules. It amounts to several hours of work a day through the peak late-summer growing season when the giant plants can add up to 50 pounds a day.

But it all starts with prizewinning genetics. The Perhams' winner is descended from a seed called 1689 Jutras, named for the 2007 world-record-setting 1,689-pound pumpkin of Joe Jutras in Rhode Island.

The Perhams' record-setter could already be surpassed by a Washington-grown pumpkin that was set to be weighed in Northern California this weekend.

Likewise, West Coast growers are keeping an ear out for news from the East, where a pumpkin in Massachusetts was rumored to be in the 1,700- to 1,800-pound range.

Benjamin J. Romano: 206-464-2149 or bromano@seattletimes.com