ABOUT PUMPKINS
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For the best eating, you can't go wrong with the
fine-grained, sweet meat of Small Sugar (100 days), which
matures at six to 10 pounds and is just the right size for
pie making. The slightly bigger Sweet Spookie (90 to 105
days) is another candidate for carving and cooking.
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If you'd like pumpkinseeds without the hulls, you might try
Lady Godiva (110 days). This yellowish pumpkin usually has
green stripes or markings and weighs about six pounds, but
— as the seed catalogues say — "its meat isn't
of table quality." Other varieties prized for their
hull-less seeds are Trick or Treat, Triple Treat and
Streaker, all of which take around 110 days to mature.
Triple Treat's sweet meat is excellent for pies. Though
technically squashes, both Sweetnut (a compact bush
variety) and Eat-All (with five-foot vines) produce seeds
that are small but deliciously nutty, and the flesh of both
is very tasty.
HOW TO GROW GIANT PUMPKINS
According to the Guinness Book of World Records ,
the biggest pumpkin ever grown weighed 612 pounds and was
135 inches in girth. You may not be able to top this 1984
giant from Chelan, Washington, but any county fair worth
its salt will sport entries topping 100 pounds. Here's how
pumpkin growers achieve greatness:
First, choose a jumbo variety like Big Max or King of
Giants, and put a whole bushel of aged manure covered with
dirt in a pumpkin hill. Sow three to five seeds, and when
the seedlings have two or three leaves, remove all but the
strongest plant. Let the vine produce two or three
pumpkins, removing any flowers that appear later. Next,
pull the fuzzy tip off the end of the vine, and —
once the pumpkins reach baseball size — pick off all
but the largest one. Give the plant plenty of water
every day . Some gardeners even slit the vine and
insert a wick that rests in a dish kept full of milk. Just
be sure to have some help handy when it's time to cart this
behemoth from the field.
Not surprisingly, the best Halloween pumpkin is called
Jack-O'-Lantern. These 10-pounders mature in 110 days, and
their smooth skin cuts easily. But if your ambition is to
take the prize for the biggest pumpkin at the county fair
(see sidebar), plant Big Max. This blue-ribbon winner,
however, requires 120 days to mature and has a shell that
is hard to carve and pale flesh that is coarse and somewhat
stringy. Furthermore, a single one of these giant pumpkin
plants — alone and unaided — can cover an area
10 to 20 feet in diameter!
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