Q&A: Meteorology faculty member discusses growing giant pumpkins
Jason Keeler is a self proclaimed life long pumpkin enthusiast.
He went a tiny bit of land behind his childhood home in New York state, to the large garden now outside his home outside of Mount Pleasant.
Keeler said this large garden is the perfect place to grow giant pumpkins, his favorite plant.
When he's not growing these giant gourds, Keeler is a meterology faculty member at Central Michigan University.
He is also the head of CMU-STORM (Student Training for Observational Research in Meteorology). CMU-STORM is a summer research program where Keeler teaches meteorology students interested in field research on how to use the latest meteorological technology, including weather balloons, and the Mobile Mesonet, a meteorological research vehicle.
Central Michigan Life spoke with Keeler about his passion for growing these giant pumpkins, and how he got started.
What got you interested in growing pumpkins?
So my family would always go every year to this one pumpkin patch, and they had their normal jack-o-lantern pumpkins, and then what they called giant pumpkins. Which were usually maybe 70, 80, 90 pounds.
And so we would get those "giant pumpkins," and I would always save like one seed from it and try to grow it in my parent's backyard. But growing up in such an urban area, and my parent's entire property was 50 by 100 feet, I was pretty limited in terms of gardening space. And their backyard was shaded too. So I was pretty limited in my ability when I was younger. But I really was excited and wanted to try.
How long have you been growing pumpkins?
I started growing, like normal pumpkins maybe when was like six, seven years old.
In terms of giant pumpkins, I probably started trying to grow larger pumpkins maybe about middle school.
I think the first year I probably gave it a serious try was in 1999, when I had an uncle, who had a larger yard, give me a chunk of his garden to try.
That pumpkin ended up being 125 pounds. But it was growing so fast that it split open and started rotting in August.
I guess I kind of got more into this hobby as I got older, and had more skill in gardening.
Where do you get the seeds from?
The seed used to grow my pumpkin vine this summer came from a 642-pound pumpkin grown in western Nebraska that I bought online. There are a lot of online forums for giant pumpkin growers, where people share tips for growing the biggest pumpkins and sell seeds. I chose that seed because it came from a pumpkin with a nice shape and deep orange color.
What are some of the challenges involved in growing them?
I had a year where I had a pumpkin that was starting to grow pretty fast. But then a cicada was actually trying to burrow up out of the ground, and actually burrowed into the middle of the pumpkin.
To let you in on the level of pumpkin nerd that I'm at, there's a series of books on how to grow giant pumpkins that I have. And in every edition of this book, there's a chapter called "Murphy's Law."
If it's not that they're growing so fast that they split open, it'll be deer, or a hailstorm, or there's all sorts of different things. Insects; there's this one type of insect that lays its eggs on the outside of the vine, and when they hatch they burrow in and eat the vine from the inside out. Those are pretty common around here.
So insect management is a big thing. Hoping you don't get a hailstorm is another. And when everything seems to go right, they can grow so fast they split open.
What other gardeners and myself like to do is, you actually kind of build like a shade structure around the so it stays jaded, and that actually helps the pumpkin skin be able to stretch better when it's growing. Because when they really get growing they can put on 20 pounds or more a day.
How big do they normally get?
There was the 125-pound pumpkin in 1999. I had another one that was 185 pounds in 2005. And that was my personal record until this year.
This year, one of them was 414 pounds. And the other one, the scale had actually broken from measuring the first one, so the estimate for the second one is about 325-330 pounds. The diameter for the first one is pretty close to three feet.
What are some challenges in carving the pumpkins?
So you can imagine for a pumpkin that large, to not just collapse in on itself the flesh is a lot thicker than a normal pumpkin. And I'd say, pretty typically several inches thick.
And so what I'm going to use to carve it is a drywall saw. But, I mean, I've heard of people having to use power tools and stuff like that. But I'm going to at least attempt to use a drywall saw. And hopefully, that'll do it.
What are you going to do with the pumpkins this year?
So for this one, I think I'm going to make it like a giant mouth. So just all teeth. And depending on how that goes, I might actually put a couple of smaller pumpkins on top to be the two eyes. And I might see if I can fit a fog machine inside of the pumpkin. I figured that'd be fun, to see the fog pouring out of the pumpkin.
And then, you're going to need more than just a candle to light that large of a pumpkin up. So I'm probably going to have just like a red light bulb, that I'll actually just have in the pumpkin.
