Linda Hall: Giant pumpkin race heats up

GIANT pumpkins are taking over our backyard.

I should start at the beginning. About three months ago, my son and his two lovely daughters came visiting.

Clutched in Miss Four and Miss Two's hands were little brown envelopes with seeds inside them.

"There's this competition going on at the girls' Montessori childcare and we don't have the room to grow them," said my son. Montessori had grown a huge pumpkin the season before and saved the seeds, and given them out to the children.

Great idea. Anything that makes children think about growing the food they eat rather than getting it from a packet gets a big tick from me.

So Mr Neat said sure, he'd grow them.

It was too early to plant them at that stage, so the seeds sat in their little brown envelopes with each girl's name on them.

Planting time came round and Mr Neat planted the seeds into little punnets.

A few weeks later he planted two of them, one in the garden by the shed and the other in a little bit of a garden down the back. The other two sat waiting for their owners to come and help plant them.

They arrived on a Saturday, each carrying a little wooden stake that they had drawn pictures on and written their names on.

So into the main garden they went with Mr Neat, they dug holes and duly planted their pumpkins.

So the race was on. We didn't tell the girls but the first time we watered the garden their drawings all ran off their stakes.

You can't actually see the stakes now as the main garden has been taken over - not by pumpkins but by cucumbers, corn, beans, silverbeet, celery, lettuce and beetroot.

You can still see the pumpkins but they are not award-winning size.

However, the ones Mr Neat planted in the other two gardens have gone absolutely crazy.

At first one pumpkin stood out. It was as round as I could make my arms reach.

The girls visited several times and had their photo taken with it.

But suddenly another pumpkin on the same vine started to explode in size.

Meanwhile the vines from both plants were creeping further and further on to the lawn.

No chance of mowing under them, so there's some long lawn among the vines.

We've fed them chook poo - which is another story in itself, actually.

We bought two bags of chicken poo from Keighleys Poultry Farm in Haumoana and threw it all over the garden.

Well, Mr Neat did, packing a far amount down around the roots of the "giant pumpkin".

Bad move. The next day was hot and humid. We came home to a backyard crawling in flies. On went the hose and out came the hoe. That fixed it.

We've also fed the plant sheep poo and "mothered" it along.

I'm not entirely sure when the weigh-in is but I'm guessing there's another month at least of growing.

The star pumpkin is now so big I don't know how we are going to get it to the weigh-in.

The rest of the garden, apart from the tomatoes, is flourishing as well.

We have beans, cucumbers, lettuce, celery and lots of herbs ripe for the picking. Must have been all that poo.

Whether or not the pumpkin turns out to be a champion, it's been lots of fun watching this monster develop.

Watch this space.

- Linda Hall is assistant editor at Hawke's Bay Today.