Keith Whitford grows pumpkins, but not just any pumpkins. In a garden along U.S-131 on the northwest edge of Three Rivers, Whitford grows oversized pumpkins. Beth Hubbard, whose family owns Corey Lake Orchards, has provided the use of an antique flatbed truck that once belonged to her father to display three of them at the entrance to her farm stand. Together, sitting on a layer of straw, the pumpkins leave little room for anything else on the truck’s bed.
Two of the pumpkins are orange, and one is white. In order from largest, they weigh 679 pounds, 524 pounds, and 505 pounds each. They all came from the same place in Whitford’s garden, which measures about 50 by 100 feet. “All three, and in a row,” Whitford said. “They were right next to each other.” When talking about giant pumpkins, Whitford said, “next to each other” means they were about 40 to 50 feet apart.
That’s because by the time the vines begin to grow, he said, the leaves can get to be “waist high and as big as elephant ears.” If the plants are too close together when that happens, it can become impossible to tell what’s growing where. “You can’t tell what pumpkin goes to what base,” Whitford said. Proper spacing helps reduce the chances of that happening.
Wider spacing also helps the pumpkins achieve their maximum size. Once the pumpkins appear on the vine, Whiford removes all but one of them on each plant. This allows the single pumpkin to benefit from all of the plant’s nutrients and water consumption.
To demonstrate how that works, a year ago, Whitford said, he was surprised to discover a vine that produced four white pumpkins. “That white one got away from me because the vines were so intense and so high.” When he finally harvested the pumpkins from that vine, one weighed 419 pounds. Another weighed 305 pounds, and the remaining two were around 200 and 100 pounds respectively. Had he culled them down to a single pumpkin, Whitford said, “I probably would have had a thousand-pound pumpkin, but it got away from me, so that goes back to the spacing.” This year, Whitford used the largest spacing he has ever used.
There are other tricks to getting large pumpkins, Whitford said. One is to buy the correct seeds, and there are only one or two varieties that produce the kind of large pumpkins Whitford grows. He sources many of his from a grower in Nova Scotia, Canada. Once he has grown pumpkins from those seeds, Whitford takes the largest ones and saves the seeds from them so he can try to plant bigger pumpkins the following season.
Another trick is to use a good location with rich soil, or to fertilize properly. “Last year, I sold a big pumpkin to a fellow, and he checked back in with me twice this year and had saved the seeds out of that pumpkin. It was a bright orange one, like my big one there. He had a beautiful little garden planted in a barnyard, which is a key word,” Whitford said.
What makes the barnyard special is the soil’s fertility. “I started bringing in a lot of manure a couple years ago, and things started getting quite a bit bigger,” Whitford said. “And then that guy last year who got that pumpkin from me, he grew pumpkins this year in a barnyard, and he had pumpkins equal to my size.”
Another friend got around having to cull his pumpkins by growing them in a fertile barnyard. That friend lives in Gratiot County, where Whitford is from. Whitford said he told his friend, “you’ve got to get off all these little pumpkins and zero in on one pumpkin, and I’ll come back and check with you in the fall. And I did come back. The whole barnyard was full of beautiful pumpkins.” Whitford said the friend “couldn’t figure out which ones to cut off, but that barnyard supported them.”
There is some element of surprise in growing the pumpkins. Even among the same variety, the pumpkins can vary in color. Of the friend who grew his in his barnyard, Whitford said, “he had all three colors of that one, same pumpkin, and I found it very unusual. I didn’t think that could happen,” he said, a white pumpkin from the same line of seeds showed up on his own vines two years ago. The white pumpkin on Hubbard’s truck is descended from that pumpkin.
Despite the scale of his growing efforts, Whitford said, “this is all just strictly a hobby.” Selling the biggest pumpkins helps offset the cost of growing them, as does bartering with farm suppliers, “because there’s quite a bit of cost to what I do.” He estimates there is between $50 and $100 or more in each large pumpkin.
Requirements for caring for the pumpkin includes watering and measures for controlling diseases and pests. A cucumber beetle can be problematic. “If you don’t catch that, they will destroy your pumpkin crop in three days. I mean, eat that new plant down into nothing.”
The pumpkins are also labor-intensive. “You know, I’m still able to do all that stuff myself,” Whitford said. “I literally just eliminate labor costs.” However, Whitford says time is the biggest resource that must be invested into the plants.
“You have to be with them and take care of them daily,” Whitford said, to keep on top watering the plants, hoeing the weeds, and dealing with insects. When he had to take a family trip this past summer for eight days, he set up timers to take care of watering and disease control. Despite that, some areas got too much water, and he lost two or three plants, bearing three or four large pumpkins in total, “before they were really big,” he said. “They were maybe 150 pounds, but too much water will kill them.”
Most of Whitford’s pumpkins turn out fine, but once the healthy pumpkins are ready to harvest and transport, they must be handled carefully. “You can imagine trying to move something that weighs 700 pounds with no handles on it,” Whitford said. They must be picked up with a forklift attachment on a tractor.
Jostling the pumpkins can cause them to split. Whitford said he has lost a few pumpkins to setting them down too hard or rough bumps while in transportation. He must travel slowly and cushion the pumpkins against shocks with special foam-covered pallets. He must also protect against damage to the hulls, which can cause them to rot quickly.
His affinity for his pumpkins means that Whitford usually gives them names. This year, because there was no fair, he did not name them all, but his largest pumpkin is named Jill. “I’m not sure why I named her Jill, but all pumpkins are females,” Whitford said. “So, I guess they’re Jill and her sisters, though technically they are not her sisters. They’re her cousins, because to be sisters, they have to grow on the same vine.”
Although he is not sure where the practice of giving pumpkins female names originated, Whitford speculated it is a mix of biology and tradition. A bee can pollinate a pumpkin without going from one plant to the next, he said, because a pumpkin vine has both male and female flowers. It is not a hard and fast rule. “Sometimes people name them after boys, and there’s no harm done there. You know, it’s just a name.”
Whitford has been growing pumpkins for 22 years. He has taken his pumpkins to the St. Joseph County Grange Fair for every one of those years from 1998 until now. In that time, Whitford says, he has only been beaten twice. “I enter a lot of stuff at the fair, and I take a lot of first place. I grow a lot of big things. I mean, if I grow squash, instead of being two pounds, they’ll be 10 to 12 pounds. I just have a knack for making stuff big.”
His first year, Whitford’s biggest pumpkin was 125 pounds. “It’s the people that take it the next year, the next step, you know, and just keep going. You just keep improving and learning. I’m at 22 years, and I know of feel like I’m a novice at it.”
Although not a farmer by trade, Whitford was raised on a farm. He was born in Alma and graduated from Ithaca High School. “I was raised on a big dairy farm, then I married my wife in 1963.” At age 20, he said, he left the farm. Early in his career, Whitford managed Sears stores around Michigan. That work brought him to the Three Rivers store in 1972, then located at Maple Lane Plaza. “I took it to its highest production and highest sales record, ever,” he said.
When that store closed, Whitford went into business selling business forms. When he retired, Whitford was working in management at Menards. However, he said, “my love has always been, you know, for the farm.” Whitford maintains an interest in two farms that belong to his brother.
“They say you can take the farmer out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the farmer, so that’s kind of me, you know,” Whitford said. “I farm everything I can get my hands on. All my extra yard space and all my gardens, everything turns into a garden.”
In addition to pumpkins, Whitford also grows “five or six varieties of squash and sweet corn, green beans, string beans, and a lot of potatoes. Enough potatoes to feed 10 or 20 families.” On top of that, Whitford grows flowers. “I probably have, like, 10,000 zinnias or something like that,” he said. “I just enjoy growing stuff.”
His family, which includes three boys and a girl, are all involved in other pursuits. Whitford’s oldest son, Troy, has helped manage sports at Three Rivers High School for around three and a half decades, and is in the state hall of fame. “I have another son who is a lawyer in L.A., and I have a daughter who is involved, big time, with real estate in Grand Rapids,” he said. “Everybody is a hard worker.”
Whitford’s wife of 57 years tolerates his many hobbies well. “She always asks me how Jill’s heartbeat was today, stuff like that. I think she thinks I’m a little too close to my pumpkins.” In addition to growing things, Whitford said he builds high-end birdhouses, along with a list of other things. “I paint houses. I do landscaping. I do maple syrup in the spring, a lot of maple syrup. I’m just always doing something. That’s just kind of me. Not necessarily a wife’s dream husband, but that’s just the way I am.”
One of Whitford’s biggest hobbies ties into his gardening and his agricultural roots. With his brother, Whitford owns and restores antique John Deere tractors, which he grew up with as a child. “The first couple years, I remember when I was like, four and five, we still had a team of horses. And, of course, then we went to the John Deeres.”
Over the years, Whitford estimates he has bought and sold around 25 tractors. Today, he has three Deeres, all different models, and other vintage equipment. He uses one 1950s-era model Deere to do all of his farming and gardening, and he finds them useful and enjoyable to operate when he is working on pumpkins like Jill and her cousins. The tractors and the pumpkins alike are, for Whitford, a labor of love.
For that reason, after this year’s fair was cancelled due to the pandemic, displaying at Corey Lake was an easy decision for Whitford. “Beth and I get along really well, and she is really good to me. I try to be really good to her. I sell her squash and pumpkins, white pumpkins. The last few years, she’s always taken my three biggest ones for her display.”
Whitford was offered “quite a bit more money” for Jill, the largest pumpkin, but said, “I figured it belonged over there with her,” he said, since she had been displaying his pumpkins following the fair for so many years past. “And yeah,” he said, “it turned out to be the biggest one I’ve ever grown. I kind of wanted her to have it.”
Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
