Who turns down a Nobel Prize? Boris Pasternak was forced to and Jean-Paul Sartre chose to. But most awardees just say thank you and dry-clean their white tie. The rest of us revel in what they teach us: this week, about quasicrystals and the wonders of spare Swedish verse. (click below to read more)
All great prizes do more than congratulate. The Longitude Prize led to modern navigation; the Food Preservation Prize created canning; the Orteig Prize inspired Lindbergh to make the first nonstop Atlantic crossing. And we can all agree that maps, condensed milk and the red-eye from JFK to Paris are good things.
But what about a 1,685-pound pumpkin? It took first prize last Saturday at the Great Pumpkin Contest in Elk Grove, Calif. It was carried into the competition by forklift, broke the state record and bedeviled me. Who sets out to produce something so wacky? And why?
I went to Napa to meet the award-winning grower. Leonardo Ureña is so passionate about outlandish produce that he could ruin you for regular-size fruit. Maybe for regular anything. As the world celebrated the Nobel winners and the late Steve Jobs, I discovered that there's as much to learn in a pumpkin patch.
Hudson Vineyards is legendary and unmarked. If you know to look, you can see its three flag poles, now sporting the Stars and Stripes, Mexico's tri-color for harvest workers, and a skull and crossbones for "Los Piratas," the grape-crushing team. It's here that Mr. Ureña, who came from Mexico 26 years ago, plants his Wonderlandy gardens.
It's not just the pumpkins that are super-size. The corn reaches 25 feet high. Sunflowers have faces 2 feet wide. And the gourds! "It was a really ugly area right there," said Mr. Ureña, pointing, so he built a 70-foot long trellis and planted his giant-breed seeds. "Now we call it the Gourd Tunnel."
Tip-toe through the hanging vine tendrils and you're inside a living sculpture. Suspended from the canopy above is an amazement of gourds: some 7 feet long, some 140 pounds. One has its own hammock: "My brother-in-law made it," said Mr. Ureña. "He said, 'You want it for your baby?' But he didn't know it was for my baby gourd."
The place is like nothing you've seen. And that's the whole point. This stuff isn't edible. The seeds, like the ones for the "991 Ureña" pumpkin, have been cross-bred for shape, not taste. Some of the produce may be sold to restaurants for decoration, some rented to pumpkin patches.
People are just delighted by it. But why? Is it the colors: gourds the green of bubble-bath and pumpkins that are pink? I suspect something else. Gourds can grow 4 to 6 inches a day, pumpkins many pounds. Is anything else so irrepressible? So unstoppable? Just as I was wishing that I were, Mr. Ureña told me that fast growth isn't always best. It was the first of seven lessons from the patch.
1. Take care not to explode. "Sometimes the pumpkins grow so fast they can't handle the stress," said Mr. Ureña. One grew a gobsmacking 44 pounds a day. "When they're growing that fast, you can't sleep at night. They're so young and tender, they can blow up."
2. Know when to sell, when to share. Mr. Ureña trades information and seeds (which he keeps refrigerated in Mason jars) with anyone curious—world-wide. "If I can help growers to get better, I do."
3. Have thick skin. "We're trying to make pumpkins that have thick walls. The thickness is going to put more pounds in the pumpkin."
4. Expect gophers. A pumpkin that looks like a winner may have been chomped on from beneath. "We're all prepared for that."
5. Remember that people, like fruit, need chances. Mr. Ureña said it was Lee Hudson, the vineyard's owner, who told him: "You want to grow giant pumpkins—why don't you try?"
6. Be surprised. Mr. Ureña has a son, Leonardo Jr.: "When I won, he came to me and said 'You made it, you did it!' You don't imagine that a 5-year-old is going to tell you congratulations. But he did."
7. Surprise others. "Yes, it's a little crazy," said Mr. Ureña, kicking around his magical patch. "This isn't something you see often. I wanted to show people something they haven't seen in the past, something unusual."
Nobels and Apples are fancy, pumpkins are not. How smart if we can prize them all.
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