Halloween Science: Growing the Great Pumpkin


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A new world record was set this month for the heaviest pumpkin ever grown. Taking first place at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Minnesota -- and beating last year's record by 85 pounds -- this Sasquatch of squashes weighed in at just over 1,810 pounds.

To pumpkin enthusiasts like Chris Stevens of Wisconsin, a contractor who grew this record-breaker, the giant pumpkin is both a work of art and the product of an ever-evolving amateur science.

"There's a tremendous amount of tender loving care that goes into this," said Tim Beeman, who coordinated the 2010 Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in California's Half Moon Bay. "These guys are like mad scientists."

These super-sized pumpkins have also attracted the attention of university scientists, who are helping growers to better understand how their pumpkins get so large and how to make them even larger.

The increasing size of giant pumpkins over time is partially due to genetic changes brought on by selective culturing. For decades, pumpkin growers have steadily pushed these fruits by swapping seeds and using other traditional breeding techniques that have been around for thousands of years.

"These are just ordinary people doing this who don't understand genetics," said Jules Janick, a horticulturalist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. "It's the way that a lot of crops like corn were originally developed."

Growers cross the biggest, most desirable pumpkins -- which produce seeds the size of a peach pit that can fetch $850 each, according to Janick -- with each other and let nature improve them over several generations. This selective breeding is called artificial selection, a term coined by Charles Darwin, and is similar to processes that occur in nature, except in this case the growers are selecting the "fittest" individuals -- the larger pumpkins -- to breed in order to pass on the more desirable genes to help create even larger pumpkins.

Giant pumpkins grow about a hundred times faster than a typical pumpkin. They can gain an average of 20-40 pounds in a single day, and as much as 60 pounds a day under the right conditions. :huh:

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