Inside the wild world of competitive giant pumpkin growing

ENON VALLEY, Pa. — In the valley of giants, pumpkins heavier than grand pianos rest atop cushioned pallets waiting to be weighed, while the mad scientist who grew them from tiny seeds sized them up from afar.

"No, not those ones," farmer Dave Stelts says on this late September afternoon. "Those are just the babies."

Like a Captain Ahab obsessed with gourds, Stelts, 65, stared farther off, his eyes fixing on the four, larger orange humps that rose amid a sea of leaves as big as elephant ears and vines thicker than human arms. That couldn't possibly be a pumpkin patch the size of a basketball court. No way those behemoths could be actual pumpkins. It was, and they were.

Stelts' eyes gleamed, a smile spreading across his face, as he did calculations in his mind. It's no small task to weigh a pumpkin that breaks a ton, but width times height gives growers like Stelts an estimate, and this year, finally, he thinks one could break the Pennsylvania state record of 2,404 pounds.

"Maybe more than one," he says.

Stelts' wife, Carol, stood beside him, holding a clipboard. She had a more stoic look. She hasn't had a summer vacation in decades because Stelts can't trust anyone to babysit his giants as they grow a mind-boggling 60 pounds a day in the heat. There are also acres and acres of corn there, but Dave doesn't have time for corn. He leases that land to another farmer.

Someday, if and when he retires from his "hobby," they might, in theory, hit the beach.

"Oh yeah, I'm obsessed. No doubt about it," he says. "We did go to Australia over the winter."

Western Pennsylvania and Ohio — Stelts saw smoke plumes from the 2023 East Palestine train derailment from his driveway— are hotbeds for competitive pumpkin growing. Is it the climate, the soil, a more Midwestern vibe west of Harrisburg? No one's sure, but you won't find many rhinoceros-size pumpkins in the Philadelphia region or Garden State.

The Steltses' home at Valley of Giants farm, about 45 miles northwest of Pittsburgh in Lawrence County, is filled with awards, trophies shaped like, well, you know, orange ribbons, and fake, giant checks. One faded check is from a quainter time, when a winning pumpkin was 800 pounds.

There is an empty space on the walls, though, a void in Stelts' life that he's yet to fill, his Holy Grail. It's the "Grower of the Year" award. Dave calls it the GOTY, pronounced like the name of infamous mob boss John Gotti.

"That's grower of the year," he says. "Can you believe I've never won it?"

Any grower who buys a giant pumpkin seed — they can sell for up to $60 apiece — could luck out and potentially grow one freakish record-breaking pumpkin, though it's unlikely, particularly if they enjoy summers. Grower of the year is awarded to the competitor whose top three pumpkins weigh the most. It's the award the diehards yearn for, and Stelts thinks he has four heavyweight contenders.

The sport — one competition in California awards $30,000 for the world record — is global, with competitors all across Europe and even in South Africa. We're currently in the midst of "Orange October," when giant pumpkins are crisscrossing the country strapped to flatbeds, or ferried across the English Channel to other countries, to be weighed and pitted against others for the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, the governing body that oversees it all.

The first week of October alone saw the GPC Kurbiswiegen Sachsen-Anhalt in Germany (pumpkin weighing Saxony-Anhalt, according to Google translate), the Smoky Lake Great White North Weigh off and Fair in Alberta, Canada, and Gateway Giant Pumpkinpalooza in Utah. Stelts was readying some of the smaller pumpkins for delivery to the Pittsburgh Zoo, where they'd be a holiday treat for the animals. Other "smaller" ones — still weighing over 1,700 pounds — would be used in a pumpkin drop downtown.

When asked about his competition, Dave's gaze, his soul, too, it seemed, settled on something far beyond his pumpkins, across the proverbial pond, to England, where identical twin brothers, his arch nemeses, were growing pumpkins that were, possibly, even bigger.

Carol made a "don't get him started" sort of look.

"Those limey bastards," he said. "I know they're cheating."

Dave seemed to be kidding.

When reached by The Inquirer at the family nursery along England's southern coast, near Southampton, Ian Paton said Stelts is one of his closest friends in the States. But there's a but there.

"Before I go and slag off Dave, let me say this is the friendliest sport in the world. We're all friends," Paton, 63, said.

Paton and his brother, Stuart, grew their first big pumpkin when they were 13. It was 54 pounds. They recently weighed a 2,907 pound pumpkin that was disqualified because it developed a hole.

"The only real competition is Mother Nature and yourself, not Dave. We are all warping and bending nature. None of this is normal. We all have the pumpkin sickness," he said. "Still, we want to beat Dave and he wants to beat us. He knows we have an absolutely enormous pumpkin."

How bad is the sickness? Paton paid about $1,500 to clone his biggest pumpkin. He also placed his newborn granddaughter on one for a photo shoot. His wife thought the cloning was a bit much.

"I was in the doghouse for that," he said.

Dave dreams of Ian's giant pumpkin, like a white whale haunting his nights in rural Western Pennsylvania. The Patons, he fears, could crack the elusive 3,000-pound mark. That means he'll have to do it, too.

"You know they grow them in a greenhouse, right?" he said.

When a neighbor and a friend arrive at the Steltses' farm in the afternoon, they fire up a tractor, attach a scale to it, and head out into the field to weigh his heavy hitters. Every hand is needed to protect and move vines and lasso harnesses around the giants, so Carol handed her clipboard to this reporter to write down the weights, which were off the record.

Dave said he didn't want to know the numbers, even though he kind of did.

"Just smile if it's bigger than the state record," he yells over the noise of the tractor.

"Yes! Oh baby!" he yells out. "This isn't even the biggest one."