That’s a great pumpkin: How a WA teacher grows some of the biggest produce on earth
Cindy Tobeck is a third-grade teacher in Tumwater, well-known not only for her ability to educate, but for growing some of the largest pumpkins and squashes the world has ever seen. Even her students call her the Pumpkin Queen.
Tobeck grew the biggest pumpkin in the world a few years ago and won a hefty prize, and this year she’s going for the biggest squash in the world. She walked The Olympian through her process on growing mammoth fruits on Sept. 22, about a week before harvest time.
Tobeck, who’s from the Olympia area, said she’s always been competitive and prize-motivated since she was little. She started showing horses when she was in third grade and became obsessed with winning at the Thurston County Fair.
“I was obsessed as a kid with, you know, trying to win the spelling bee every year,” she said. “It was just all about winning and being the best.”
Tobeck said her parents bought an old dairy farm in East Olympia that had good soil from years of cows running on it. She said the first garden her parents planted, which included some giant pumpkin seeds, just exploded. Some of the pumpkins pushed 200 pounds. As a kindergartner, it was the coolest thing she’d ever seen. Her dad decided to take her to the Puyallup Fair to show her some real big ones.
“And so I went to the Puyallup Fair, and I just knew when I saw them, that was going to be me someday,” Tobeck said. “And so I held on to that dream for years.”
So when she got her first house, she put in a pumpkin patch and started growing for fun while continuing to show horses and win national championships with them. That lasted five or six years, until she noticed the weight of her fruits really starting to take off.
“I thought, ‘Well, why not try to be one of the best growers in the state,’” she said.
Instead she became one of the best growers in the world. She said she’s been in the top 10 worldwide for grower of the year several times for giant pumpkins. She also has a Guinness World Record.
“I guess I’m just very prize motivated,” Tobeck said. “I love to win, you know, whether it’s with the horses or the giant fruits and vegetables.”
This year’s fruits
Tobeck has four greenhouses on her property she built from scratch out of metal top rail she cut and giant tarps from Costco to save money. She said an 1,100 square foot greenhouse kit can cost growers $25,000 each, just to house one plant. Her method cost her $2,500, she said.
And each plant takes up that entire space. Tobeck said having each one is like having a toddler living with you, and at their peak, they grow 40 to 60 pounds a day, which is more like a third grader. She said in the springtime, vines grow a foot a day, so you have to keep up with pruning. And one of the secrets to growing a giant pumpkin is burying all the vines so they root and bring in more nutrients. She has to lay hundreds of feet of drip line to keep the fruit hydrated. She monitors the plants daily for root rot and vine stress, sprays for bugs, feeds fertilizer into the drip lines and has to keep mice at bay.
Tobeck learned a trick from one of her fellow giant pumpkin growers to keep mice from eating away at the fruit: sprinkle cayenne pepper all the way around it. She said the mice don’t cross it, that it’s like a force field.
She said she typically has a much larger array of plants to show off, but she decided to take it a little easy this year while training for and completing the 93-mile Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier. Typically she cares for close to 15,000 square feet of garden space, and this year’s 4,400 square feet feel like a total vacation.
But the time off did some damage to her first squash plant. Mice had gotten to what she thought was going to be the next world record squash. She doctored up the chews, put fans nearby to dry the holes out and left for a week of hiking. When she came back, there was a rough spot underneath the squash that couldn’t be helped.
She had to toss the 1,500-pound fruit, but her horses got to enjoy it. She found that the plant had a smaller squash growing on it, so she didn’t give up on the plant. It may be paired with two larger ones to give Tobeck a chance at being crowned squash grower of the year.
Paired with the smaller squash is a roughly 800-pound pumpkin growing on a 150 square-foot plat. Tobeck said it’s probably her prettiest pumpkin — lumpy and deep orange with yellow starbursts — but the smallest one. She’s growing it as part of a worldwide challenge to encourage people to grow food in small spaces.
Tobeck’s next squash sat entirely on its own in a neighboring greenhouse, its vines stretching out of its 1,100-square-foot confines. She thinks it’s a prize-winning squash, which she nicknamed Jabba the Hutt for its wrinkles and bronze-green color. The squash was originally growing on a scale until it reached about 300 pounds and started growing its stem into the board it was on. It’s now well over 1,000 pounds. She’s taking it to a national championship weigh-off on Sept. 30 in California.
The next squash is even bigger than the last, with Tobeck estimating it at 2,000 pounds or more. She said she’s sure it’s the biggest squash in North America, and probably the second largest in the world. She just has to keep it alive until harvest time.
Tobeck said not only does she have to keep mice and other animals away, sometimes she has to keep the sun at bay. She has to make sure they don’t get too hot or too cold, which involves blankets, heaters and fans. The fruits are also covered to keep the sun from damaging their skin, but they also need to be uncovered plenty often to help them green up.
This squash is going to a weigh-off in Oregon on Oct. 7. She said the competition is a gamble, because measurements aren’t always accurate. Measurements show the squash weighing about 1,700 pounds, but she’s hopeful the squash’s thick walls, which she tests by thumping like a melon at the store, will tip the scales.
The Great Pumpkin
In Tobeck’s last greenhouse rests her biggest pumpkin yet, one she’s hoping will be her personal best. The sunset orange fruit with “great shoulders and a great big blossom,” Tobeck said, is estimated to be well over 2,000 pounds. The pumpkin that got her the biggest pumpkin in the world title a few years ago was 1,910 pounds, and her personal best was 2,002 pounds.
A couple things went into growing such a large specimen, Tobeck said, including some luck and networking. There are a couple of Pacific tree frogs that live on the pumpkin that she calls her good luck frogs. And having the right seed helps.
She said the seeds for this type of pumpkin are the most sought after in the world, going from $800 to $1,100 at online auctions. In the wintertime, when growers have nothing else to do, she said, they bid online for seeds. Then growers donate their seeds to clubs all over the world, who host online auctions to raise money for weigh offs. She got her seeds from another grower she met at the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth convention in Danvers, Massachusetts, last March.
Tobeck is taking this pumpkin to the Carpinito Brothers Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Kent on Oct. 1. She said she’s excited to haul her fruit around in her truck; people always go crazy when they see her driving down the road with a giant pumpkin.
Tobeck likes to add in some fun with all the work and include her students when she can. She said right before harvest time she likes to put on different costumes and pose with her pumpkin. She’s dressed up like an alien, a Sasquatch, and this year she was Dream Pumpkin Barbie. In the past, she’s Zoomed in her classes while at weigh-offs so they can celebrate with her.
“The kids love it. They think I’m just like the coolest teacher ever,” she said. “And then, and they love the pictures and they love to Google me and see me with all these giant pumpkins through the years. They think I’m kind of famous.”
