By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Emory Harger
From our November 2024 Issue
Sarah Whitty’s entire .15-acre Veazie yard is devoted to growing freakishly large fruits. There are lime-green long gourds dangling like boa constrictors from a 14-foot-tall trellis, a green-and-black marrow that conjures a verrucose dinosaur egg, a glossy honeydew-green bushel gourd the size of a beach ball, a half dozen “mega-bloom” tomatoes (formed from fused blossoms) bowing their fine-mesh slings, and the stars of the jumbo show: a pair of chest-high Atlantic Giant pumpkins so heavy their resting sides are completely flattened. One is named Captain Jack Sparrow, after Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean character, and he’s not looking so hot.
“Pumpkins are needy,” Whitty, a champion giant-fruit grower and the president of the Maine Pumpkin Growers Organization, said on a recent morning. “You can’t leave them, because if you leave, bad things will happen.” They might get too cold, which can stunt their growth, or too hot, causing them to mature too fast and split. (Whitty’s pumpkins sleep under her grandmother’s old comforters when it’s chilly.) Too much rain can induce fungal infections and nibbling critters can weaken gourd walls, causing cracks. One morning a week prior, Whitty awoke to discover a foot-long split in Jack, who’d been chewed by a rat over the summer. At approximately 700 pounds, Jack is impressively brawny, but he’s slowly rotting from the inside out.
On the other side of the yard, this year’s sole pumpkin survivor, the coral-dappled Martha Stewart, lords over a patch of more than 60 vines that feed her alone. At 70 days old, Martha weighs about 1,200 pounds, a calculation derived from a formula that factors in the gourd’s height, width, and circumference. “This pumpkin is big, obviously, but it’s probably not a first-place-size pumpkin,” said Whitty, whose smooth, uniformly orange 1,482-pounder, Snoop Gourd, won the prize for prettiest pumpkin at New Hampshire’s Deerfield Fair weigh-off last year. (Martha grew from Snoop’s seed and her name was inspired by the friendship between the real-life pair.) “But you never know until the weigh-off. Some of them have thicker walls. So you think your pumpkin’s 1,300 pounds, but it actually weighs 1,400 pounds and it’s awesome.”
During her first year in Veazie, in 2012, Whitty watched a jack-o’-lantern the previous owners had tossed in a compost pile sprout vines and bear fruit, all on its own. “I figured, since it seemed so easy to grow, it would be fun to grow a big one,” she said. “I’ve always been competitive, and I think it’s cool testing the limits of nature.” Her largest pumpkin to date, the 1,521-pound Watson, took third place at the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest & Regatta contest in 2018. Over the last few seasons, Whitty’s been experimenting with other gargantuan fruits, including marrows, a zucchini relative that matures faster than pumpkins and attracts fewer competitors. Last year, Whitty set a state giant-marrow record at the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest with a 60.5-pound specimen. “I feel like getting a U.S. record is an achievable goal,” she said.
In addition to pumpkins, Sarah Whitty also grows giant marrows (left) and trellised long gourds (right).
Sadly, neither of the marrows she grew this year are competition-worthy — one succumbed to fungus and the other split shortly before our visit. It’s the latest blow in a season whose challenges are ongoing. During the summer, Whitty discovered squash-vine borers, moths whose burrowing larvae can weaken or kill plants, on her pumpkin vines. She’s been painstakingly digging the larvae out with a switchblade ever since.
Whitty works part-time as a physician assistant, and typically spends about 30 hours a week fertilizing, watering, and weeding her garden, battling pests, and trimming and burying pumpkin-vine offshoots so they don’t bear fruit that competes with the alphas for nutrients. She chronicles her ups and downs on her social-media channels and keeps a running tally of the pumpkins’ weights on a whiteboard by the road for her neighborhood fan club. “I grow giant pumpkins and it occupies my life,” Whitty said. “I don’t make dinner. I live off protein shakes. My boyfriend will open the window and be like, ‘Sarah, it’s nine o’clock at night! You can come in now!’”
Follow Sarah Whitty on TikTok and YouTube @pumpkinista and on Instagram @pumpkinista_maine. Her giant pumpkin, Martha Stewart, took second place at the Damariscotta Pumpkin Fest weigh-off, coming in at 1,593.5 pounds.
