I Put My Life on Hold to Grow the Largest Pumpkin in the World

In What It’s Like, people tell us, well, what it’s like to have experiences many of us have not even imagined. In this entry, we spoke to Travis Gienger, a self-described champion pumpkin grower, horticulture professor, and business owner who lives near Nowthen, Minnesota. This year, Gienger’s Atlantic Giant pumpkin beat world records at 2,749 pounds, which involved a preternatural amount of time and dedication (which might explain why he’s set the U.S. record for the largest pumpkin for three years in a row). This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I grew up around pumpkins. My dad grew big ones that were 80- or 100-pounders, and I always thought it was neat. Every kid loves pumpkins. We would also go to the state fair and see the giant pumpkins there, and I thought, “That’s kind of cool. I want to grow one.” When I was 14, I grew a 470-pounder. That was three decades ago, and I’ve been growing pumpkins ever since. I’m just now starting to get the hang of it. I didn’t even win a contest until 2020, but that year, I set the North American record with a 2,350-pound pumpkin.

It’s all about figuring out the right recipe. This year, I started in mid-April, with my plants indoors because it’s easier to control the temperatures and germination. I started with two seeds, hoping that I’d get two pumpkins—you start with two to increase your chances of success. Hopefully, you have two at the end, but it doesn’t always work out that way. After the seeds germinated, I transferred them outside to a little hoop house in my backyard, right out my bedroom window, so I could be right there as they grew. They had good soil, heating, cables, and grow lights. I spent two or three hours a day with them. My friends thought I was nuts, especially because I skipped the opening day of fishing to take care of a giant pumpkin.

Every day, I would get up in the morning and figure out what I wanted to spray. If there were bugs, I’d spray them with a pesticide. I also had to decide whether I wanted to add more nitrogen to the soil and plant, which promotes plant growth. I had to really watch them for signs of what they needed. A good grower can look at a plant and say, “This is what it needs.”
Mid-day, I would bury some vines, which encourages the root to expand and go into the ground. Then I’d check the fertilizer, fill up the jugs, and then water them all day, off and on. At night, I would check the pumpkin, move some vines again, spray, and then go to bed. It was a lot of pruning, spraying, weeding, watering, watching, and moving.

For me, the right recipe is all about fertilizing, watering, and the biology in the soil. I used 15 different fertilizers, including seaweed. I also use different biological products, like mycorrhizae fungi, to get the pumpkin that big. With biologicals, you’re putting microorganisms in the soil that attach to the roots and fix nitrogen.

You also have to use the right seeds. Recently, pumpkin growers have been taking seeds from the biggest pumpkins, crossing them with the heaviest, and then improving those genetics over time. Ten years ago, the world record was 1,800 pounds. Through crossbreeding, we’ve gained almost 1,000 pounds in just a decade, which is crazy. There’s a group of worldwide growers—we trade, buy, and sell seeds. The seed I grew my giant pumpkin from cost almost $600.

I have a lot of sponsors from major fertilizer and biological companies, like Xtreme Gardening and Douglas Plant Health—they help me with the cost of growing. You could grow a nice pumpkin for a couple grand, but I tend to need a lot more than that. One company sent me $4,000 worth of soil, which really helped. Between the two pumpkins, I probably got $15,000 worth of retail costs from sponsors.

As spring progressed into summer, the pumpkins mostly grew at the same rate. But then the second one started going wild, growing at 43 pounds per day. I lost it at 2,220 pounds, with a month and a half left until the competition. It just split in half.

Another challenge was a big hailstorm. A lot of people have hail matting over their patches to protect them. I don’t, but I should. My plants are so damn expansive that it’s hard to cover all of them. There was nothing I could do. There are still hail marks on the surviving pumpkin. Wind and hail are our worst enemies.

I waited until the last possible minute to harvest it, and I didn’t weigh it before the competition, which was on Aug. 17. It wrecks the whole fun of it. And it was a zoo trying to pick it up and get it to California. I drove it in a Ford F-250 in a trailer, and I had to use a forklift to get it in. I traveled with my dad and father-in-law, across mountains, dodging elk and motorcycles. It killed my gas mileage. I got 8 or 9 miles per gallon.

When I got there, I knew I would do well. I had a decent feeling. My other friends in California had used my seeds from last year and brought in a 2,497-pound pumpkin. When that one got weighed, I was like, “I don’t know if I have that.” And when I was announced the winner, it felt great. Thirty years of work all came down to one minute.

I’m going to put the prize funds [$9 per pound and an extra $30,000] toward a college education for my daughter. As for what’s going to happen to the pumpkin, we can’t really make pumpkin pie out of it—it’s more water than anything. The pumpkin is getting shipped to New York to get carved for the Guinness Book of World Records. It’ll get sculpted for the world record jack-o’-lantern. The final carving will be on Nov. 8 because it will take almost a week to carve. We’ll collect all the seeds out of it and give them to auctions so other people can grow big ones.

The pumpkin’s name is Michael Jordan, by the way. He was the greatest basketball player of all time, and back when we started this thing, we weren’t sure if it would be the greatest pumpkin of all time. But it currently is. And it’s the year of ’23, which was his jersey number. It’s pretty heavy, though, so you can’t dunk it.

I’m absolutely going to try for the world record again next year. I think we could definitely push the 3,000-pound mark. And I’d use one of the Michael Jordan seeds. It’s definitely a good seed.