Growing pumpkins to scary sizes

Visitors to the OPW’s walled garden have been enthralled by its giant pumpkins while the gardeners are already busy planning for next year’s crop of show-stoppers

IT’S HARD to believe that six months have passed since gardeners Brian Quinn and Meeda Downey sowed the seed for this year’s pumpkin harvest, raising the tender young plants in heated glasshouses late last spring before planting them out into the OPW’s walled kitchen garden in the Phoenix Park in early summer.

While the gardeners grew three different pumpkin varieties – including Gold Fever and Hobbit – it was the record-holding Atlantic Giant that Brian expected great things of. This, after all, is the variety that the American pumpkin-grower Joe Jutras grew in 2007, when he set a new world record of 1,689lbs/766kgs. But such is the competitive nature of giant pumpkin growing that even Jutras's record may already be broken. Earlier this month, at the annual Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers Annual Weigh-Off (yes, there is such a thing), Ohio farmer Christy Harper produced a pumpkin that weighed in at a colossal 1,725lbs, making it a new contender for the Guinness Book of Records.

While Brian and Meeda’s biggest pumpkin of 2009 didn’t reach such vast proportions, it did beat their 2008 record by a considerable amount, weighing in at 116lbs or almost 53kg, and with a height and circumference of 60cm and 182cm respectively (these measurements matter in the world of competitive pumpkin-growing). That’s over 50 per cent larger than last year’s pumpkin, which weighed around 77lbs/35kgs.

It’s just one of 20 giant pumpkins grown by the OPW gardeners this year, and what an amazing sight they are. Like a shoal of vast golden sea urchins adrift in a sea of leaves, they’ve completely taken over one corner of the walled kitchen garden, while nearby, the resident scarecrow stands watch over the smaller specimens (there were over 120 of these).

Visitors have been enthralled, particularly children, who invariably stopped to stare in awe at these colourful heavyweights of the vegetable garden. Brian is chuffed but not content: “We didn’t do badly, considering they were grown outdoors in a poor Irish summer, without using any artificial fertilisers, and when you think that the two biggest specimens were vandalised earlier this month. But next year will be better.”

Why so? Well, for one thing, he plans to concentrate the growth by restricting it to one pumpkin per plant (this year’s plants were allowed to produce an average of two giant pumpkins each). He also plans to set aside one patch of the walled garden, which he and Meeda will pre-sow with a green manure, and which will be reserved for just one isolated plant. This will be cossetted weekly with vast amounts of manure, liquid organic fertiliser and other secret ingredients to encourage it to flourish. (The Ohio farmer, Christy Harper, admits to feeding her record-breaking pumpkin with cow manure, coffee grinds and compost, but you’ve got to wonder what else went into it.)

And then there are the more convoluted methods of encouraging outsized pumpkins that Brian’s been reading about, such as adjusting the NPK balance according to the different stages of the plant’s growth. “You’re supposed to feed it a potassium-rich fertiliser at the beginning of the growing season, to help establish a healthy root system, followed by one that’s nitrogen-rich (for the leaves), and then one that’s high in phosphorous (fruit and flowers). But we’ll see.”

He’s also heard that it’s best to wait until the plant has at least 800 leaves before allowing any flowers to pollinate. Quite who has the time/concentration/ memory to count 800 individual leaves on their pumpkin plant is a mystery, but apparently this isn’t a worry for some dedicated pumpkin growers.

As well as all this, it turns out that there’s an important genetic component to setting giant pumpkin records. While Brian and Meeda grew the Atlantic Giant variety, there’s an improved form of this known as Dill’s Atlantic Giant, named after the late Canadian grower, Howard Dill, aka “The Pumpkin King”. Known as the grand-daddy of all giant pumpkins, this is the variety used by most competitive growers, and given the right growing conditions, it’s quite commonplace for it to produce pumpkins in the region of 400-500lbs.

Dedicated as ever, Brian plans to buy the seed of this variety over the internet next spring, while Dill's website also gives useful advice and growing tips (www.howarddill.com). If you'd like to know more about Howard Dill's lifelong quest in pursuit of the perfect giant pumpkin, there's even a book about it. Read The Pumpkin Kingby Al Kingsbury, which is available from www.amazon.com.

Finally, if any urban farmers have grown what they believe to be a record-breaking pumpkin, but haven’t a clue as regards its possible weight, then go to the website www.bigpumpkins.com, where Bart Toftness tells you how to get a fairly accurate estimate, based on its circumference and over-the-top (OTT) measurements. It’s complicated stuff, involving spreadsheets and the like, but he does give lots of advice on “how to do the maths” as he puts it.

Curly Kale

While pumpkin growing and carving has become a big feature of Halloween, there are many other customs and traditions associated with the ancient festival of Oíche Shamhna. As kids (and as adults), we always enjoyed "divination games", as the late Kevin Danaher describes them in his book A Year In Ireland.

One of the best was wrapping small items (coins, buttons, thimbles, rings and even a scrap of material and a matchstick) in greaseproof-paper, and then hiding them in the colcannon, which is a traditional dish at Halloween. According to Danaher: “The ring meant early marriage, the coin wealth, the button bachelorhood and the thimble spinsterhood while the chip of wood revealed that the finder would be beaten by the marriage partner and the rag meant poverty”. Not very cheerful stuff, but we didn’t seem to mind.

We made our colcannon from mashed potato mixed through with lashings of melted butter, fried, diced onion and chopped, boiled kale, which we generally harvested fresh that day. In the OPW’s walled kitchen garden, Meeda and Brian have grown two varieties of this hardy vegetable this year, including a tall, handsome, curly kale variety with frilled inky-purple leaves called Redbor, and a green leaved variety called Darkibor. Both have proven to be easy-to-grow, needing nothing in the way of attention since they went into the ground early last summer.

A hardy member of the brassica family, curly kale will also survive in the winter vegetable garden quite easily, remaining almost unscathed by even hard frosts. In fact, cold weather is thought to improve the flavour of this leafy vegetable. And while the mature leaves are what’s generally used in dishes such as colcannon, the young, tender shoots are also particularly tasty in springtime.

But rather than lifting entire plants, treat curly kale like a cut-and-come-again crop by harvesting just some of the leaves at any one time (cut out the midrib before cooking). A liquid feed in spring will also encourage the plant to produce further young shoots/leaves, which should be picked when they’re about 10-15cm long.

Vegetable expert Joy Larkcom recommends steaming or stir-frying these, before serving with what she calls a “glorious garnish” sauce, made with “a five-to-one mix of vegetable oil and light soya sauce, plus crushed garlic – delicious and well worth trying”.

Yet another fan of this useful vegetable is gardener and cookery writer, Sarah Raven. "I'm obsessed with kale," she says in her book Garden Cookbook. Like Larkcom, she loves it stir-fried but also gives several other tasty recipes, including kale bruschetta and a hearty winter soup called Ribolita, which uses kale alongside various winter vegetables.

Her favourite, however, is kale seaweed, which she makes by deep-frying the leaves and serving them with a topping of brown sugar, salt and crushed cashew nuts. Perfect, she says, for parties. And we all know that nothing beats an Irish Halloween when it comes to having one of those.

• The OPW's Victorian walled kitchen garden is in the grounds of the Phoenix Park Visitor Centre, beside the Phoenix Park Cafe and Ashtown Castle. The gardens are open daily from 10am to 4.30pm

• Next week Urban Farmerin Propertywill cover using Autumn leaves to make leaf mould

• Fionnuala Fallon is a garden designer and writer