You Grow Girlâ„¢

I always thought that this was an innocent hobby. It's actually rather cutthroat and involves a lot of fertilizer and water in the name of being number one. If you ask me, it's more a human accomplishment that happens to involve a plant. Here are some tips of the pumpkin growing superstars, things that may seem a bit odd to the uninitiated. If you ask me, only true pumpkin maniacs would go so far in pursuit of a giant, unedible vegetable.

• Soil is most important. Most how-to articles recommend digging a pit five foot square and three feet deep (!) and filling it with a mixture of sheep, chicken, horse and cattle manure and leaf litter all mixed together with topsoil.
• Before germination, seeds are put in water and aerated with a fish tank bubbler "to introduce lots of oxygen into the water and to the seeds".
• "Avoid touching the fruit with your bare hands…Wear clean gloves if you must," writes one grower. Apparently pumpkins can suffer viral problems if actually touched.
• Growers keep diaries of daily measurements and progress of their plants
• Dowsers are sometimes hired to find a source of underground water. Growing pumpkins get as much as a thousand gallons of water a day.
• "Pumpkin cabanas" shade the actual fruit during mid-summer, while elaborate windbreaks protect them from the wind.
• Special heating units are dug into the soil before transplanting outside, so that the soil can be heated from below and above.
• One grower suggests treating transplants like newborn babies.
• Avoid soil compaction in the pumpkin patch: "Wear snowshoes if you must."