How it all got started

You've been reading about the Giant Pumpkin Contest in the MANA news, and you've also been reading about it on the Mana distribution list on the web, but I bet you've been wondering how this whole thing got started. Well, here it is......

About a year ago my mother gave me some women's magazine that she had finished reading. In one of them was an article about a woman that had more acreage than she knew what to do with so she started sharing it w/her neighbors. Her neighbors started growing pumpkins and having a contest. I think this has been going on for several years. I don't remember where, or any more details than this. This sounded like a pretty fun thing to do so I filed it away in my brain to try and remember it in the future.

Then, the first year my neighbor Dave moved in I noticed a pretty large pumpkin on his front porch around Halloween. I hadn't met him but I thought it pretty neat that he had such a large pumpkin. The seasons passed and I eventually met Dave and his wife. We shared gardening conversations and last summer when Dave was going on vacation he asked me to water his pumpkins. (I didn't know that he had been growing giant pumpkins) .

It was a lot of fun going over every evening and watering and seeing how much the pumpkins had grown from the previous 24 hours. Dave succeeded in growing a 130lb + pumpkin. In fact he had 5 large pumpkins as summer ended.

If I could figure out how to post pictures, I'd post one of his pumpkins.

Anyway, Dave got me hooked, and I decided to enlist my fellow neighbors to give him a little competition this summer in the growing of Giant Pumpkins. He's graciously provided the seeds from his pumpkins from last summer. I've passed out seeds to 20 friends and neighbors so we have the makings of a pretty spirited competition.