Oh my gourd! Record pumpkin locally grown

For Brant Bordsen's agricultural feat to be revealed as just a dream, his pumpkin would have to turn into a carriage.

Bordsen, city attorney for Marysville, broke the state record Sunday in Elk Grove with the pumpkin he grew this year south of Yuba City: 1,648.5 pounds.

That smashed the old state record by more than a hundred pounds and was less than a hundred pounds from the heaviest gourd in the world.

"When it gets that big, it's not me doing the growing, it's God," Bordsen said. "I'm just lucky to have been along for the ride."

Bordsen began growing Atlantic Giant pumpkins about 12 years ago, and began entering them in contests a decade ago. Occasionally he's had a product in the top five but had never won, before Saturday at the Giant Pumpkin Festival of Elk Grove.

He said he had a sense his luck might change when his record-busting pumpkin began growing in late June.

"About 30 days out, it was showing tremendous growth," he said.

In August, it grew by an average of 25 pounds a day, and as many as 50 pounds twice. When pumpkins begin growing that big that fast, he said, there's a chance of them literally blowing up. When it was smaller, you could plant a bamboo stalk near the gourd, walk away, then return a few minutes later and find the pumpkin swelling against the stalk.

Bordsen and Ann Mottola, special events manager with the community services district that puts on the Elk Grove festival, said there's a caveat to growing such behemoths: They're not good for much else.

"I'd call them sport pumpkins," Mottola said.

Bordsen said such pumpkins aren't particularly good for pies or other baking, but they do get used in displays and by carvers, as may happen to his prize winner.

During the peak growing period, Bordsen said he put in 30 minutes of work a day: watering regularly but not continuously, fertilizing every other day, and keeping the pumpkin covered from elements that could cause cracking.

At least partial credit should go to a stimulant called Shake-n-Grow, made by a Mid-Valley couple, that could be compared to a steroid, Bordsen said. When he first used the stimulant last year, he went from 900-pound to 1,200-pound pumpkins.

"This year, you can imagine, I used a ton of it," he said.

But luck played a role as well. Summers are typically too hot in the Central Valley to grow really robust Atlantic Giants; a mild summer this year put Bordsen in competition with traditional big growers on the coast.

The pumpkin never split, never got infested with bugs, never experienced any rot. If he'd waited a few more days before cutting it to take to Elk Grove, Bordsen said, it's possible he would've had a world-record holder.

Pete Glasier, a Napa retiree who previously held the state pumpkin record, said all those factors have to be present for a winning weight.

"Everything's getting better, and we're getting more growers and new information all the time," he said. "It's amazing. You don't know where it's going to end."

As it was, moving the massive gourd wasn't easy. A special lifting ring, with straps to make sure the weight was distributed evenly, had to be affixed, followed by a forklift placing the pumpkin on a flatbed trailer.

Mottola said Bordsen's entry caught the giant pumpkin farming community by surprise.

"Because of the odd weather we had, the talk was there weren't really any big ones," she said. "So when this one rolled in, everyone's eyes were huge."

For Bordsen, winning and receiving $6 per pound, plus selling the seeds, covers his costs, which he said can be $2,500 a year for some growers.

The giant pumpkin competition has made leaps since the first Elk Grove festival in 1994, when the winning pumpkin weighed 389 pounds, said Elk Grove recreation supervisor Zach Jones.

Within a year or two, he said, someone will break Bordsen's record. And in the same time, Jones predicted, a grower somewhere in the United States or Canada will top the one-ton mark.

Could it be Bordsen?

"We always want to do better, but my personal best is pretty high up there," Bordsen said. "This could be the pumpkin of a lifetime."

CONTACT Ben van der Meer at 749-4709 or bvandermeer@appealdemocrat.com .