The Tale of Magnolia's Giant Pumpkin Patch
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by Greg Shaw, Magnolia’s Pumpkin Man
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On July 21st, 1969, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon, I was living in a rented house on West Hayes Street in Magnolia, and my first giant pumpkins were gaining size in the front yard.
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A few months earlier, I had gone to Pike Place Market looking for something unique to grow in the yard, maybe because it was in my genes. My parents were outstanding gardeners. We gardened together as I grew up. They had a greenhouse, as I do today. The promise of Big Max pumpkin seeds caught my eye: "Grow 100-pound pumpkins," the package read. I bought the seeds and two of the largest pots I could find, with a capacity of around forty gallons. The plants produced my first two pumpkins, which were just about a hundred pounds each.
It would be six years before I grew pumpkins again and a new street-side, attention-getting attraction would be born in Magnolia.
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A new start
After graduation from the University of Washington thanks to the GI Bill, I returned to Magnolia and moved into the house directly behind the one in which I grew up and now live. It was a tiny little place, situated on the back of the lot with a large front yard. Close to the front of the house was a small flower bed where I placed two pumpkin plants. They did well, and each year I added more. The little flower bed evolved into a pumpkin patch that took over the entire yard. Perhaps my life!
In the beginning…and growing…soon where no postman dared to go, circa 1970 and 1980. Photographs courtesy of Greg Shaw.
I soon received a notice from the postal service that my mailbox had to be moved to the front sidewalk if I wanted mail. I met with the postal supervisor and was told my yard, with its vast greenery and thick twisting vines, was deemed too treacherous for mail delivery. I was getting a reputation! I was like Jack and his beanstalk in the Mother Goose tale! Due to a few late-night visitors without good intentions, I eventually placed a baby monitor in the back of the mailbox—now I was acting like an expectant father? It served as a pumpkin-prowler warning system and it worked well, but I heard more than prowlers.
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Back then, few people had seen giant pumpkins. It was fun catching people as they walked by and commented. From the baby monitor, I heard surprised voices as the pumpkins caught passersby off guard. Back then, the top three comments were: 1. "Holy…some expletive"; 2. "Way cool"; and 3. "A little old man must live here." (Those last folks must have seen the future.)
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Much, much more...
Because my many pumpkins and now ornate patch were such a novelty in the 1980s, they got a lot of publicity in newspapers, on TV shows, and even Sunset magazine. Kathi Goertzen, Steve Pool and many others brought cameras and crews to get the scoop. Many more came to visit, seeking secrets to my success, or to do a Fall, Halloween, or Thanksgiving spread or three-minute spot on the local news. I was on the front page of the Magnolia News many times. All of this motivated me to do more with the pumpkins and the patch every year. Preschools and grade schools took field trips, and sometimes fifty children at a time dared to go where no postman would! I delivered pumpkins around Halloween to local schools so Magnolia kids could enjoy them up close. I also delivered some to Ronald McDonald House and Seattle Children’s Home, sometimes with carvers from restaurants dressed in their whites to cheer the children up.
Brian Tracy and Penny Legate filming feature story on the pumpkin patch, circa 1985. Photograph courtesy of Greg Shaw.
Moving giant pumpkins is a challenge. Ultimately, I welded a steel frame with four wheels that tilted, so a padded pumpkin could be rolled onto it and moved. For the really large ones, I built a winch to get the pumpkins on the cart and it became a two-person job. Sometimes, doors were removed to help me ease the pumpkin into my truck.
Carved and lit! Circa 1980. Photograph courtesy of Greg Shaw.
At the peak
Many years on Halloween, I carved and lit a hundred small pumpkins, surrounding the giant pumpkins to great effect. I built a scary tunnel leading to the front door with a strobe light bouncing off wisps of fog from dry ice. This was before the Halloween trick-or-treating celebration for kids in Magnolia Village. Back in those days, I would have around a thousand trick-or-treaters coming to my front door. I was trading with Bartell at the time, giving their store in the Village pumpkins for candy, and would go through about a hundred big bags of mini bars. But for the most part I was financing my own fun. I often rigged up other scary surprises for my Halloween visitors, projected voices or music to add to the eerie feeling, and devised tricky ways for kids to receive their treats. I took photos for an extra attraction and gave them to my visitors.
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Surprise—tricks and treats caught on camera! Circa 2018. Photograph courtesy of Greg Shaw.
The growing attention (and my growing pumpkin patch)…
Both are met with much curiosity. Timid voices and little inquiring minds always want to know:
Do you ever take your pumpkins to contests?
Yes. A long time ago, I took one to the Puyallup Fair. At the time, I had the perfect vehicle to transport the pumpkin, an AMC Pacer—the car itself looked a lot like a pumpkin. Two of us wrestled my largest pumpkin into the front passenger seat, the seat belt wrapped around it nicely. I did get quite a few double-takes as I drove down the freeway on my way to the Puyallup Fairgrounds. My pumpkin weighed in at 178 pounds; that year’s winner weighed around 500 pounds. I soon decided competing was not the point of my endeavor! However, I have since grown pumpkins in the 400 pound range! This year it looks like my largest will be over 500 pounds.
Greg costumed like the farmer in American Gothic with a trick (or treat) photo!
Circa 2020. Photograph courtesy of Greg Shaw.
What do you do with the pumpkins after Halloween?
People look at me like I am a bad person because I don’t turn them into a thousand pumpkin pies for a food bank or feed the animals at the zoo. The reality is, they are hybrid pumpkins bred strictly for size and speed of growth. I once wanted to try the pumpkin pie route and thought I found my answer when a friend who had attended Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in France asked if she could have a pumpkin to make pies. She reduced and reduced the pumpkin flesh for two days until she could reduce no more, and still it had no flavor. I also tried boiling a few pieces of pumpkin and eating them like squash. I am not sure what happened—maybe it was the Miracle-Gro fertilizer—my entire head turned red and streamed with sweat for about twenty minutes after I ate two small pieces. So, after Halloween, the pumpkins are composted and become nutrients for next year’s crop. If a few are still in good shape, they will stay through Thanksgiving before returning to the earth.
Before..., year unknown. Photograph courtesy of Greg Shaw.
Do you roast the seeds?
If you like eating seed-shaped fiberboard, you might enjoy them. I save the seeds for growing; if you knock on my door in the spring, I am happy to give you some. There are up to six hundred seeds in a giant pumpkin. If you had a prize-winning pumpkin and sold the seeds for $35 each—an amount I have shelled out—you would not think about roasting $28,000.
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Will you sell me a pumpkin?
I have never sold a pumpkin. These days, the pumpkins stay in the yard for everyone to enjoy.
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When do you start growing them?
I start them around April 15th in four-inch peat pots and place them on a heat mat in the house. The plants sprout in five to seven days. Then, I transplant them to one-gallon pots and move them into my greenhouse. Once sprouted, the roots grow through the bottom of the peat pots, and I plant the whole thing, peat pot and all, directly into the outdoor bed—or I transplant in larger pots, repeating the process until all are planted outdoors. The roots grow very fast, so you don’t want to leave them too long. They become root-bound quickly, which stifles the plant.
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How do you they get so big?
Rich soil and compost, the maximum amount of sun, and fertilizer, both water-soluble 20-20-20 liquid and granular fertilizer. The growers that produce record-breaking giant pumpkins take the process to scientific levels. I have picked up a little knowledge: they have the soil analyzed and amended for perfect growing at the beginning of the season. Soil is tested two more times during the growing season and changed accordingly. I also recommend using the best seeds from the previous year’s biggest pumpkin.
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What’s the biggest pumpkin I have grown?
The biggest have been between 500 and 600 pounds. Last year, I purchased three new seeds. One of them came from a 2,100-pound pumpkin and was one of those prized $35 seeds. I used the seeds from the pumpkin I grew last year for this year's pumpkins.
How much do the pumpkins grow in one day?
In my years of growing pumpkins, their speed of growth has captivated me the most. At the peak of a growing season, I measure the vines to see how fast they grow. It can be ten inches in twenty-four hours—that’s almost half an inch an hour! I can look at the pumpkins each day and tell they are bigger than they were the day before. Serious growers say that their pumpkins gain fifty pounds a day. At the beginning of the growing season, my yard is just rototilled dirt; by the end of August, ninety days later, the front yard is covered with yards of pumpkin vines, and ten to twenty pumpkins are growing strong from just eight to twelve one-inch seeds.
…and after! This was a very good year! Circa 2020. Photograph by Greg Shaw.
Pumpkin history and milestone
Norm Gallagher of Lake Chelan set the first world record in 1984 with a 612-pound pumpkin. I once attended a pumpkin weigh-in at Lake Chelan. I asked one of the growers’ wives how her husband prepared his soil. She told me, “He digs a hole the size of an Olympic swimming pool with a backhoe and then fills it with his secret mix.” Thirty years or so ago, a thousand-pound pumpkin was the ultimate goal. Today, Travis Gienger from Minnesota holds the world record—his 2,749-pound specimen called Michael Jordan, which needed watering twelve times a day, won the 50th World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California on October 9, 2023 and earned him $30,000.
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Growing giant pumpkins is a real thing! Serious dollars are earned for champions. The history surrounding them is interesting. "Since the 1970s, pumpkin records have routinely been beaten. The rate of record growth has been increasing at a linear rate and does not appear to be slowing down, indicating that there are still substantial genetic and cultural improvements to be made in giant pumpkin growing (1)."
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The variety of a past world record pumpkin, Atlantic Giant Pumpkins, were first bred by Howard Dill of Nova Scotia. I used to purchase my seeds from Dill. Here is Dill; you can get your own Atlantic Giant Pumpkin seed from him, too! Though the claim that he holds the world record is no longer true.
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Ever heard of the Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers? Let me introduce you to Jim Sherwood, founder of the group who lives in the same gardening zone as ours in Tualatin, Oregon! He has all the tips for growing your own Atlantic pumpkins.
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It took me about ten years to research, retry, and realize the scope of what is involved in growing world-record pumpkins. Gradually, I realized that I would have to be content with growing the biggest pumpkin in Magnolia.
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More trivia about my patch
One year, I had a bad crop and felt it necessary to purchase a few large pumpkins from Country Farms Produce on Highway 99. I forgot to erase the price that had been written on the pumpkins with a grease pencil. An irate pumpkin patch visitor and enthusiast soon confronted me and accused me of being a fraud.
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A strange thing happened to my biggest pumpkin this year. I had placed some Styrofoam under one side to tilt it back, relieving some pressure on the stem and vine. As pumpkins grow larger and larger, one of the most fatal flaws is if they break themselves off the vine. About forty-five days ago, this pumpkin flipped over nearly 180 degrees during the night on its own and is now upside down. Yes, that is hard to believe, but it did happen. I was afraid it would amputate itself from its vine. However, it has continued to grow. Pumpkin Gods or pumpkin miracles seem to be looking out for this pumpkin. There was no sign of vandalism, as the pumpkin was surrounded by thick foliage, which would have been damaged if someone had flipped it over on purpose. Spooky, right?
Halloween trick (or treat) photography emphasizes how fast and big one pumpkin can grow over the others! Year unknown. Photograph courtesy of Greg Shaw.
In conclusion
The magic words that have kept me motivated and growing are: "When I was growing up, my parents would take me to see the pumpkin patch; now, I am bringing my children to see the pumpkins." Halloween night is now almost a non-event. What I enjoy most is seeing the many repeat visitors enjoying the pumpkins as they begin to grow and show from July to Halloween.
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