How did I get into this business?

For the longest time, I’ve wanted to grow not just a pumpkin, but a giant pumpkin! At the time, I didn’t really think it would be all that difficult. After all, I grew up on a dairy farm and ran my own dairy for over 20 years, cultivating a variety of forages for our cows.

In 2009, we started planting pumpkins. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. That year, we had a cooler spring, and I ended up killing most of the plants I put in the ground due to cold shock. Pumpkins are temperamental; they love warmth.

That year, we ended up with two pumpkins the size of softballs. We quickly realized there was plenty of room for improvement.

The following year, we had much better success and began learning how to manipulate growth for larger pumpkins. By 2013, I thought I had figured out how to grow what I considered “giant” pumpkins—100 to 300-pounders—which were some of the coolest things I had ever grown.

By the spring of 2014, I discovered the Utah Giant Pumpkin Growers Association. What? A group of people who grow giant pumpkins? Yes! They compete for the biggest, and they even meet at Sugar House Park, dressing up, climbing into the pumpkins, and racing each other across the lake, using the giant pumpkins as boats.

Naturally, this intrigued me, and I had to be a part of it. I showed up to my first weigh-off that year with a 615-pound pumpkin and placed 15th out of 40 competitors. In Utah, many growers still applauded your efforts, but the goal for those who had been growing for years was to break the 1,000-pound mark.

In 2015, I went all in. I built hoop houses, buried heating cables in the ground, and started off with a bang. Utah’s unpredictable weather has its own way of knocking you down, but that didn’t stop me. Every time I went to the dairy, I passed the pumpkin patch to feed the cows or make adjustments for better growth.

On August 30th, I had a pumpkin estimated to be over 1,000 pounds. But then I noticed four holes in it—not easy to spot. It had grown so fast that it split open. Luckily, I had planted 15 plants, and one of them managed to push herself to a new personal record of 1,016 pounds, which earned me 5th place at that year’s competition.

And that’s where Cache Valley Giant Pumpkins began. I had grown 14 pumpkins over 400 pounds that year!