April is the ideal month to prepare for autumn! Because now is the time to sow squashes and pumpkins. Choose potimarrons Huchi Kuri, squashes Butternut and Rouge vif d’Étampes: their flavoursome, sweet flesh will give you the best soups, gratins, purées and pies.
Atlantic Giant pumpkin: a competitive variety!
But if you have children (or a childlike soul and neighbours to impress), get ready for Halloween by planting Jack O Lantern, or better still, grow giant pumpkins: the pumpkins Atlantic Giant.
Jack O'Lantern and Atlantic Giant squash
It is from these particular seeds — not genetically modified but carefully selected over the years — that you can obtain large, very large pumpkins.
For decades Americans broke all the records. But currently a young Belgian grower, Matthias Willemijns, is world champion with a pumpkin weighing 1,190.5 kg. That is the weight of ten baby elephants. Or of a hippopotamus. Or, if it makes it clearer, of a Peugeot 206.
Growing giant squashes: an expensive but lucrative sport!
In the USA, growing such “monsters” is almost a sport, which can cost a lot of money (fertilisers, nutrients, plant protection products, greenhouses, irrigation and heating systems at the start and end of the season, shading in summer, etc.) but which can also pay off: major competitions offer significant prizes of up to several tens of thousands of dollars. Champion pumpkin seeds can also sell for around $20 to $50 each, even more. At specialised auctions, a seed was recently sold for the modest sum of... $800! Given that a pumpkin can contain 300 to 600 seeds, that’s a business that can become very interesting…
Giant pumpkins are often then carved into monstrous lanterns for Halloween.
How to grow a record-breaking pumpkin?
Cultivation of Atlantic Giant is exactly the same as for ordinary squashes or pumpkins: sow indoors in small clumps in mid-April, and plant out in the vegetable plot from mid- to late May, when all risk of frost has passed.
Provided you manure the soil very heavily where you plant it, ensure regular watering and keep only ONE fruit per plant, you can quite easily reach a weight of 100 to 200 kg.
And afterwards, what do you do with it?
I grew Atlantic Giants for a few years. The biggest weighed 212 kg!
Of course, ideally you need strong friends and neighbours to move the pumpkin out of the vegetable plot, and then to enjoy soup, gratin, flan, ice cream, purée and pumpkin pie. Even if this variety is not the best from a flavour point of view, it can still provide a substantial soup base for a school fête, a scout camp or a soup kitchen evening. Guaranteed effect if you celebrate your children’s birthday in autumn, or if you display the monster in front of your house: passers-by coming to have their photo taken beside the squash are worth their weight in gold!
So, for a few years, at the very beginning of creating the garden, we grew giant pumpkins. Beside them, my little boy looked tiny.
That is how I named my garden “Pumpkins and Elf”.
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