Anchorage Daily News

NIKISKI -- Last year, the biggest pumpkin in Alaska blew up just days before the state fair.

J.D. Megchelsen, who had set state records for three years running, thought he was on track for No. 4, which needed to weigh more than 1,019 pounds -- the size of his 2006 winner -- by the third week of August to be a winner. The monster cucurbit in the Nikiski grower's greenhouse was snacking on enough water and fertilizer to put on almost 20 pounds a day. The explosive cell growth was just too much. The pumpkin cracked open.

Which is why, a year later, Megchelsen has his face impertinently close to the blossom end of another giant pumpkin. That's what most folks would call the bottom, though this contender has been trained to sleep on its side so the base doesn't have to shoulder all the weight.

That was more than 600 pounds in July, with weeks of growing still ahead.

"A good concave base helps to tell the overall strength of the pumpkin," Megchelsen says in the same tone one imagines George Plimpton describing the hindquarters of Secretariat. "If the shape there is weak, the walls may not have enough strength to mature without collapsing."

Megchelsen says he isn't going to have a record-setter this year either. (At the beginning of the week, he thought his pumpkin weighed about 850 pounds.) But he chuckled at the idea that, with summer's late start and near-perpetual gray skies, this wasn't a propitious year for growing a champion pumpkin.

Megchelsen, who cultivates his monster babies at his home here on the often-cloudy Kenai Peninsula, says you can never cultivate a contender in a state of nature. In any year, it takes a hothouse to make a giant pumpkin in Alaska.

"If you just put a pumpkin seed into the ground when it was warm enough," he says, "you'd almost never get a pumpkin at all" -- much less a mega-gourd.

SURVIVAL OF THE BIGGEST

"My first diary entry this year was Feb. 18," he says, pulling up photos on the laptop computer at his dining table. His 15-by-20-foot greenhouse looks like an island in a sea of snow.

"I'm not planting yet here, but I was getting the growing bed ready, laying in the warm-air ducts."

Megchelsen already had the seeds he would plant: He'd germinate a few early to make sure the lot was viable and then plant two seeds for keeps.

Two.

"It seems kind of risky to only start two seeds," he acknowledges with a grin. "But I was pretty confident."

He was also realistic. There simply isn't room for "insurance" plants in the greenhouse. Whichever of the two seeds produces the most vigorous vine gets the run of the place, launched toward glory with a steady diet of calcium nitrate to promote overall plant growth.

Once the pumpkin has set fruit, however, the game changes. Megchelsen moves in to "terminate the secondaries" -- pumpkin grower-speak for chopping the vines running from the main leader off at about the 12-foot mark. The goal is to channel the plant's energy into the target fruit, not the overall plant growth.

Besides amputating the excess herbage with a sharp shovel, Megchelsen changes the diet. The entree is now phosphorus, not nitrogen -- key to developing thick walls and a really big pumpkin.

While Megchelsen wants as much mass as he can get, he must keep that bulk from working against him. He trains the vine to form a V, extending away from the pumpkin stem, so the fruit's shoulders don't pop it off the vine prematurely.

"Even then," he says, "I had to get in there later like a rugby player, when it was about 300 pounds, and pull it farther out of the way of the vine.

And if he doesn't have a sturdy pad (covered with sand) under the pumpkin before it exceeds 200 pounds, he won't be able to get a forklift under it. And that means it would never get to the state fair and the judges who bestow crowns on Alaska's greatest vegetables.

1,000-POUNDER

A lifelong gardener, Megchelsen absorbed the basics from his grandfather Paul, who tended 20 acres on an Iowa farm when he wasn't teaching school or fishing. "That man loved to fish," Megchelsen says, "but his number one hobby was gardening."

Megchelsen got interested in giant pumpkins when he read about a Homer gardener who set a state record "in the year 2000, I think" with a 300-plus pound pumpkin.

"I thought WOW! A 300-pound pumpkin!" Megchelsen remembers, his eyes alight. "That just seemed, you know, unattainable."

But the bug had bitten and Megchelsen wanted to try it himself. So the next year he did a little research, bought an over-the-counter package of "Atlantic Giant" pumpkin seeds and grew himself a 150-pounder.

Energized, he started researching genetics. "I quickly learned that the guys who were setting records were paying close attention to the family tree of their seeds," he says. "They weren't planting just any 'Atlantic Giant' off the rack."

The next year his best pumpkin rotted, but in year three he set an Alaska record with a 707-pounder. His entry the next year weighed 941. Then, in 2006, he and the state fair judges held their collective breath as the platform scale wavered for several minutes around 1,020 pounds, finally settling at 1,019.

"A thousand pounds. That's still a benchmark," he says. "That's a real giant."

SPRINT TO THE FINISH

Megchelsen pats the massive hulk that sits this year under a shroud of Visqueen, the gauzy wrap that wards off cold and wind. "One of this guy's parents was the world record last year, and the other parent was the world record the year before. That's a pretty impressive cross," he says. "Lots of folks are going to be watching this one."

Those "folks" would be plant breeders and growers of world-record pumpkins such as Rhode Island's Joe Jutras. They are not secretive as you might suppose but fraternal, sharing both growing information and seeds -- the latter for a price.

"This Wallace 1068," Megchelsen says as he points to an entry in his online journal, "that was a great one. Five seeds of that went at auction for $850 per seed. It's known for heavy-walled pumpkins."

The growers are generous with information but competitive, each hoping that such community will improve their own odds of creating the Mother of All Pumpkin Pies.

While a state record is always in reach, Alaska pumpkin growers know a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records would require more global warming than we care to think about.

"We've got long days with cool temperatures and it never gets too hot," says Megchelsen. "That's all to the good, but if you're growing at a latitude of about 42 degrees you just have more of it."

Ontario, Michigan and Rhode Island have been home soil for recent world champs, all of which had about a month more growing time than Megchelsen's will get in a perfect year.

Pumpkins competing for giant recognition are checked by judges for cracks and other blemishes. It's not just a beauty contest. "People used to stuff things into pumpkins -- lead weights, whatever," Megchelsen recalls. "Now we are scrutinized even for pinholes." A hypodermic syringe can give somebody the winning edge.

Last week a surface crack appeared in his entry, but it seems to be healing, Megchelsen says. "If the crack penetrated to the cavity, it would be disqualified as an official entry." But that doesn't look likely.

Even the most honest growers push for every advantage. On the day Daily News photographer Fran Durner arrived to take the pictures accompanying this article, clear skies at the height of the growing season meant the greenhouse was left open most of the day so Baby Huey could sunbathe. The next day was cool and dreary; Megchelsen popped the top for a few hours when the sun broke through, but quickly put his trophy under wraps when clouds made a chilling threat.

"I'm checking the NOAA site every six hours," Megchelsen says. "I don't get too far away at this time of year."

Home gardeners who don't want to lose a weekend's fishing because they're baby-sitting a giant vegetable can follow the fun without juggling fertilizers, setting up a 1,000-watt grow light or pinching off competitive fruit buds themselves. At BigPumpkins.com/Diary, you can follow the doings and musings of Megchelsen and others who keep journals on the site.

One day early this month, for instance, he sprayed nutrients on his pumpkin that it could absorb at 75 degrees -- a rare moment this summer, but one he jumped on promptly.

"Everything I do is to keep the plant from having any downtime," says Nikiski's Pumpkin Man. "In a short season like we have, you want to maintain forward progress all the time."

Master gardener Mike Peters lives and tends his plants in Anchorage.

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