For competitive gardeners, bigger is always better
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FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Few people can pull off the color orange like Brad Bledsoe. Then again, few people are as invested in pumpkins as he is.
Earlier this month, Bledsoe became the first pumpkin grower in Colorado history to break the one-ton mark. Weeks later, Bledsoe broke his own record harvesting a 2,190 pound behemoth.
Since becoming a regular on the competitive gardening circuit, Bledsoe said he has stocked up on “pumpkin-themed” outfits. When I met him at his 3,200 square foot greenhouse six miles west of Wellington, Colorado, all he was missing was a sprout of green hair to match the stems of his precious gourds.
Giant pumpkin growing isn’t just a zany hobby — top finishers can earn more than $4,000 at weigh-off events in Colorado and even more out of state. Seeds from winning pumpkins sell for hundreds of dollars at online auctions and innovative gardeners continue to push the bounds of how big pumpkins can grow.
Seeds of obsession
For the record, it was Bledsoe’s wife who first proposed the idea to grow a pumpkin in 2021. A blank space in the couple’s front yard sparked the idea. Bledsoe bought a packet of Atlantic Giant seeds and let nature do the rest.
“I just kind of threw it in there, let it grow. It was the king of the neighborhood,” said Bledsoe.
At the end of the season, he decided to take his pumpkin to a competitive weigh-off, one of four such events in the state that typically take place between late-September and early-October.
“We get there and my pumpkin is one of the smallest ones there, if not the smallest. It ended up being 195 pounds. My daughter, who is four at the time, she goes, ‘Dad, why is your pumpkin the smallest one here?’,” he said.
“That hit my competitive bone, and I was like, all right, let's dive into this and see what we can do.”
A year later, he grew a 1,729 pound pumpkin, the second-largest in state history at the time.
Since then, Bledsoe — a firefighter by day and pumpkin cultivator by night — has poured everything he owns into growing giant gourds — he moved houses, constructed a greenhouse and learned the science behind growing a giant. Admittedly, it will take several more winning years to break even, but Bledsoe said that prestige is the ultimate prize.
The first step was to understand his soil. He sent samples to a lab in Idaho. The results provided him with a complete picture of his garden’s pH levels and the makeup of nutrients and minerals.
Over the course of the growing season that begins in April, Bledsoe chemically adjusts his water and soil’s pH levels and maximizes gourd growth by adding fungi and synthetic fertilizers.
Bledsoe’s next step was to focus on vine maintenance. Rather than allow the pumpkin to grow any which way, competitive gardeners bury vines to strengthen the root network and minimize tertiary growth. Growers strive to funnel all of the plant’s nutrients towards one pumpkin instead of multiple, smaller gourds.
“It's three or four hours a day that I'm either in here watering or doing some sort of vine maintenance,” said Bledsoe.
While a greenhouse provides more control over the climate, Colorado doesn’t offer growers ideal conditions for cultivating pumpkins.
“Unfortunately our daytime temps are too high and our nighttime temps are too low,” he said.
Bledsoe grew up in Windsor, Colorado and first worked with plants on his grandfather’s farm in Sterling, Colorado.
“When I was in fourth grade, I shot out all the street lights with my BB gun, so my mom said, ‘Hey, you can't have any spare time ever.’ From fourth grade all the way through high school, I worked on a farm with my grandpa,” he said.
Before taking his current job as a firefighter, he worked at a plant nursery where he bolstered his gardening knowledge.
“Gardening in general is kind of like therapy for me. You go out there and you can kind of forget about the problems of the world,” he said.
The practice of growing giant pumpkins dates back more than a century. Selective breeding helped growers like William Warnock break the 400 pound mark at the 1900 Paris World's Fair.
Thomas Andres, a research associate at the New York Botanical Garden wrote, “For the next 70 years, little changed in this maximum weight. Finally, in the 1970s and 80s, records started being smashed … I mean squashed, when Howard Dill of Nova Scotia bred the ‘Atlantic Giant’ pumpkin, which is the basis for all giant pumpkins today.”
Today, the Minnesota gardener Travis Gienger boasts the world record for heaviest pumpkin at 2,749 pounds.
Early summer is the busiest time for Bledsoe — at its peak, a giant pumpkin can gain more than 50 pounds per day. But late-summer and early-fall are the most stressful times for Bledsoe.
“Big giants are giant babies,” said Bledsoe. “Things go wrong and they go wrong quickly.”
Mice can chew through a pumpkin, disqualifying it if the hole is larger than three square inches. A pumpkin can rot from the inside or growers can botch the lift and drop the pumpkin before it makes it to competition.
“It’s kind of like losing a kid to college,” said Bledsoe, as he cut off his second of three competition pumpkins from the vine in early October.
One pound bigger
Although trash talk and rivalries are common, Bledsoe said that the giant-pumpkin community is generally supportive. Hobbyists share advice, swap seeds and post updates on Facebook groups and message boards.
“Everybody's willing to help each other, right? But you always hope that your pumpkin’s one pound bigger than theirs,” he said.
When Bledsoe first started out, he turned to successful local growers, like Aurora gardener Chad New.
New has since become Bledsoe’s arch-rival, playing leap frog for the state record.
New, however, admitted that he’s happy to see Bledsoe’s success.
“He’s really setting the bar higher for all of us. Now I have a mark to go for,” said New.
To those closest with Bledsoe, the fervor with which he dove into competitive gardening came as no surprise.
Bledsoe’s father, Rod Bledsoe, said that his son has always been competitive.
“Maybe so competitive that you couldn’t let him be the banker when you play Monopoly,” said Bledsoe. “Your hotels and houses might disappear.”
“I always joke that these are his ladies, and when he comes home from work he goes and sees his ladies, then comes inside and sees the rest of us,” said Stacy Bledsoe, Bledsoe’s wife.
When Bledsoe works multi-day shifts at the fire department, Stacy is the only one he trusts to water the pumpkin correctly. This year the couple postponed a vacation to Mexico until after pumpkin season.
“At least he doesn’t drink or gamble,” said Stacy Bledsoe.
A daring extraction
As the sun dipped behind the mountains, Bledsoe’s friend arrived with a skid-steer to extract the pumpkin from the greenhouse. Bledsoe, his father and father in law rang the pumpkin in webbing to transfer it to a wooden pallet.
The procedure is less precise than brain surgery but, based on Bledsoe’s concentration, equally tense.
When the pumpkin was finally loaded onto his trailer, Bledsoe exhaled.
“My favorite thing is having this thing on the back of my truck and just seeing people's faces light up,” Bledsoe said. “It's almost like their cares and worries dissolve for those two minutes.”
After taking his pumpkin to the weigh off, Bledsoe carves it with a chainsaw. His daughters help him to scoop out all the seeds. The last stop for a star pumpkin is Colorado State University, where the pumpkins become bison food for the university’s herd.
