Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Production Funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.

Continuing their second century of service to the community Member FDIC Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer director Scott Knutson.

In this season 12 finale Jay Solberg of the Clearbrook area grows a giant pumpkin to compete in his community.

The last weekend in September, the city of Gonvick holds Pumpkin Days.

It's a giant pumpkin contest.

Hey my name is JJ Solberg and I'm going to try to show you how to grow a giant pumpkins.

I started growing about five years ago and got really addicted to it.

We'll go into town and see how big they actually got them and seemed like it'd be a good thing to do and I'm pretty competitive.

So I want to try to beat these guys.

These guys got a lot of time on me, 25 years probably.

So I've kind of taught myself a lot of things but I've also did tons of research online.

So everything about these things is online.

If you need information, the biggest thing is the seed itself.

You can buy a seed but it might not be the genetics you're looking for.

I recommend going through other growers.

There's other people that do this all over the world.

The biggest secret I think - there's no secret.

It's genetics.

It's right here.

So today, I'm going to show you how I start my seed and get one out in the garden.

Get her growing.

Here are my seeds.

I got this is from last year's pumpkin.

You can kind of tell some are bigger than others.

Some might be deformed.

I'll try to pick out one that looks nice.

Then I'll take it.

What I'll do is, I do not touch the end here.

I'm going to sand off the sides so it germinates faster and sprouts quicker.

I took off the side.

I didn't get too deep in there.

You get too deep.

you'll see the inside and that's no good.

After I sand them I'll take and write what seeds they are on a cup and I'll soak them in water for about four hours.

So after that I just use regular Miracle Grow potting soil and I'll put them in the cups and I take a heat lamp and set it up and I try to keep it about 85 degrees and I keep up the watering it.

You'll see it start to dry out.

Just keep up the water and it usually takes about four days and they're germinated.

Some people put heat pads underneath here.

This for me works the best.

So probably on the fifth or sixth day they'll sprout and it'll be two leaves.

It'll just come up be two leaves.

After the two leaves, you'll get your third leaf and when this comes you want to get them out in the ground because the roots on these things are expanding very fast and they're starting to wilt a little bit because they're their roots need to be spread out.

So that's why we'll get them in the ground today.

This one here is a 1103 pound pumpkin come out of.

This one here is a 1348 pound pumpkin and this is one I grew three years ago that was a thousand eight pounds.

But I'm going to go with 1348 and one of my own.

The 1008.

They both look very aggressive.

They're already starting to spread the main vine here.

So, once they get out in the ground it's gonna take off.

So those are the two I'm going with and come July we'll be pollinating and then get a pumpkin going and August will be the month where we hopefully put on 30 40 pounds a day for a week or so.

Come on.

As you can see I got these hoop houses made.

Biggest thing right now for these pumpkins is the wind and it's kind of windy today.

Once I get them in here I got to kind of monitor the temperature.

I want it to stay about 80-85 degrees.

So some days like today it's pretty hot in here now.

I'll probably have to open up one end get some air going through there.

But we'll lift this up and get it in the ground.

So what I do I dig a hole and I get this potting soil.

So let's take a little fertilizer.

This is nitrogen and potassium.

As you can see, the third leaf is here.

My plant is going to run this way.

It's in the ground now.

This will be my root.

Hopefully, it's about that big.

My secondaries will run this way and my pumpkin will be probably 15 to 18 feet to the south here.

So, let's get this down and covered up.

I'm just gonna put some dirt around the outside just so the wind doesn't blow it away.

Wow it's hot in there!

Well, it's July 5th and I figure I'm about a week behind schedule, but we've had weather that's up and down.

It's been so cold and then it got so hot and the plant we had in the hut died, so I transplanted another one in there and they're doing all right.

I'm trying to keep up with watering but they need Mother Nature to help out a little bit too.

So, like I said you need good genetics.

You need luck and I'm not having much luck right now but just keep our fingers crossed and see what happens here.

But I'm going to show you how to train the plant.

If you planted this thing and just let it go we'd just it'd be just a big mess.

So we're gonna train it, move the vines, bury vines and hopefully they start taking off.

These are secondaries coming off the main vine.

There is a pumpkin that's going to be started out probably 10 feet.

Probably not going to want that one.

Hopefully, to get a little further but we'll take what we can get this year.

So what I'm going to do, I'm going to train this plant.

So each secondary is going to come out like this and they'll probably run almost to the edge of the garden and the same on the other side.

What we'll do now, once we get training our vines, we're going to bury them.

When I do this I'll take a shovel and just take some of this fresh dirt shovel in there like that.

You can see that the vine is buried.

I leave about a foot and hopefully each day now we'll be out to here and be out to here and out to here and hopefully the plant just starts blowing up and gets really really big.

Well as we bury the vines as it's growing out it's going to help out by doubling your plant.

You're going to get another root and then like one of the worst things for these plants are wind.

So when the dirt's around here I mean you can take and kind of prop that up like that.

By putting the dirt, you're doing two things.

Creating roots and stabilizing the plant.

So, it's a very crucial part of growing a giant pumpkin.

So, while we're burying the vines we're creating another root.

So, if you look right here on this plant, see that - it's another root so I'm just gonna shovel some dirt back there and let it filter in and then as Ido this if I want this vine, see how it's kind of heading this way I'm just going to put it over here.

Add a little more dirt.

You don't want to bend them too much but you can move these vines around pretty good.

But if you don't do this once in a while it just gets to be a really big mess.

You'll see some flowers in the back.

Those are males.

We will eventually pollinate this thing.

We don't want to cross pollinate with anything else.

I got squash on the other side here.

So you don't want to be going over the squash and then landing on this pumpkin.

It's going to mess it all up.

So you want to keep the genetics.

We're either going to cross them or self-pollinate them.

So that's when we take the males which have long stems.

You can plainly see how long the stem is.

Eight-nine inches there with a flower on top and it's got the stamen in it and you have a female which has a little pumpkin started to grow on the bottom.

It's probably about two days away for this flower to open up and I'll come out early in the morning when she's opened up and I will cut some of these male ends off and pollinate it myself.

That pumpkin there we got one two three four five six seven secondaries behind it.

I'd like to have more but if that's the only pumpkin we get, that's what we're gonna have to go with.

We're gonna have more secondaries out here but I'd like to be further out but.

Last time we were here our secondary was out there so it's still continuing growing.

As it grows burying the vine, just keep on burying it.

Up here on my main vine at about 12 feet probably I have a female up here.

When they're small like this I don't want the sun hitting them so I'll just keep a rag on them and the big leaves protect them too.

But just don't want that sun beating on that skin otherwise it dries it out.

This pumpkin I used a band-aid when I pollinated.

Works good.

Nothing got in there.

The pumpkin is doing awesome I think.

It's got a nice long stem on the back and it was a good pollination.

It's been about 10 days since the day I pollinated it.

So I took my main vine and I'm doing an s curve with my main vine.

I'm gonna crank my main vine this way and then I'm going to bring it around this way.

So I can save this whole area will be for the pumpkin.

Another thing you should watch out for as it's growing right now, you want to make sure your main vine you got roots behind here.

So you want to get down and cut those roots so the vine comes up with the pumpkin otherwise your stem is going to be like that.

Because this thing will get so big and so fast you could just snap your stem off the back.

So, as the pumpkin grows you're going to bring this plant up with it with the vines and it's really simple.

You just get underneath cut your tap roots.

Make sure your secondary is going alongside the pumpkin.

They can lift up with it.

Two years ago I pollinated on July 27th and that was 1179 pounds.

Now I'm going to show you how to pollinate the pumpkin and we do this because we don't want to cross-pollinate.

We want to keep these genetics.

So to grow a big pumpkin, you don't want to cross-pollinate it with anything.

So we're going to take the male flower and put that with the female flower.

The bees have been in here doing some work today on these.

So, you want to try to take as many as you can.

It's the best of three at least.

So we're gonna take our males we collected and we got a female here.

You can see there's a little pumpkin on the bottom.

The female flower will be open in the morning.

It's closed now so that'd be called the stigma and you're going to take the male ends and put around there.

Get as much pollen from the male on the female.

So what I do there, I take the male.

I get rid of the flower and I'll just sit and dab the pollen on it.

At like eight nine in the morning, these flowers are opened up.

You don't have to open them up like I'm doing.

This is on a secondary vine.

I will be cutting this one off so and let's keep getting as much pollen on there as I can.

More the better.

After that's done, you'll close the female up and use a bread tie.

I've used plastic bottles cut in half shoved over, to go cups, hair nets.

You just don't want anything else getting in there after you pollinate it.

Once that's done with it you got three to four days and you'll find out if you did it right or not.

If you don't do it right they'll shrivel up.

You'll tell and then you cut them off eventually.

Just get rid of them.

July we're trying to get this plant big.

We're trying to get so much power put behind this pumpkin.

It's not even funny.

Come August that's when you're going to see your growth and then we're going to be terminating the vines.

Cutting them off and we're stopping growth and focusing all the energy on the pumpkin.

But right now we're just letting this pumpkin grow and still trying to get as much of a root base out here as we can.

By next week I'll have the fence lit up.

So we don't want any critters in here.

Raccoons, bear, deer because they're out here.

Well we're here in August and this is a month we've been kind of waiting for.

This is the month that's either going to make us or break us.

Usually breaks my heart but hopefully this year it's going to go good.

This is the first time I've had a plant in this good of shape.

I've usually got bad hail storms in July.

It's doing good.

We're going to take our 25 day OTT measurement it's called.

It's three measurements.

It would be a circumference measurement, side to side and front to back and that's just going to give us idea how big it is and we'll figure out from where I measured it before to where it's at and seeing what it's gaining per day.

So hopefully we're up into 30 pounds a day right now.

I measured it four days ago.

So we're gonna try to figure out if we need to push this thing more with more water or some calcium something like that or it might have to be slowed down.

Which then we'll maybe cut off some vines but I'm just gonna probably let it grow see what happens.

And there again I'm just going straight down off the backside of the pumpkin, come around the top of it, bring it over the front to the board and five foot nine inches.

So I'll do a little bit of calculating here and my total is 343 minus 220 equals 123 and we're gonna divide that by four days because that's been four days and that's 30 pounds a day.

That's good numbers.

If it started growing too fast you got to worry about this end the blossom end.

It'll actually just split open or get a crack or you could start cracking along here.

It looks really healthy.

I don't think it's going to crack or nothing but at 30 days or 30 pounds a day that's nice gains right now.

So the next two weeks this thing I'm hoping it starts getting into the 40s.

That's when we're gonna get her big.

So, we did a really good job pollinating because every part of that pumpkin's growing.

Like I said one of the things this time of year as a pumpkin that is growing you want to check vine stress.

So, we turn this main vine back here this way and I've been clipping back behind here the tap roots.

So as the pumpkin gets bigger it's going to bring this vine up and we just don't want this part to get too big too stressed out and it could snap off.

I like the way this thing looks.

It's gonna have really big ribs.

Like it's gonna be hopefully these are like eight inches.

You could put your hand on when this thing is growing.

I think this thing's gonna look really mean.

It's not gonna be all flat and big.

I think this thing's gonna be like huge.

Now in August on the past years, I've always terminated every vine.

This year I'm letting the front of the pumpkin grow still.

We got good numbers but from here back everything's been cut off and pruned.

From here I got these vines growing still.

If my numbers were to drop in the next few days I might terminate everything.

But if I get more better numbers I'll keep these things growing.

So maybe in a few weeks from now I'll get a really big push.

I've never did that in the past.

I don't know if it's going to be good or bad.

We'll find out.

The day of the contest came and it was time to load the pumpkin.

Wade Klima he's been a grower since the beginning and he ended up getting out of it for a while and he got back in it because he was diagnosed with an awful disease ALS Lou Gehrig's disease.

It's a nervous system disease that weakens your muscles.

You lose function and there's no cure right now so it's awful.

First year everybody bet a 12 pack.

The loser had to give the winner a 12 pack of beer and it turned out to be like 68 people.

We're going so nobody we didn't do the 68 12 packs but it turned out to be a little event.

That's why my kid brought that big one.

More and more I look at it I'm pretty sure this will be my biggest pumpkin I've grown.

Gonvick Pumpkin Day is it's a small town event but it brings people from all over the region to come to Gonvick to see these big pumpkins.

If you haven't heard we are taking signups for the prizes at the trailer.

So if you have kids or adults that would like to sign up, please come on up.

So many things going on there's car shows, there's kids games, they have a dance at the bar afterwards, they have a flea market.

But it's kind of a good thing in the fall.

Everyone's getting together, getting their cars out for the last run before you put them in the barn and just celebration of the summer and hang out and have a good time.

On your marks, get set, go!

The pumpkin drop gets a lot of people excited.

Pumpkin drop is where we take one of the bigger pumpkins up around a thousand or so and we lift it up as high as we can usually about 50 feet and we fill it up with candy or water and we let her drop and let the kids either go get slimy or get candy.

There's gold in there!

We've cut a hole in it and filled it up with candy and we lift it 50 feet in the air and we drop it and let the kids run in and grab all the candy they want.

Maybe a little bit more with the candy in it.

Here we go 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1!

It's a crowd pleaser!

Next up is JJ Solberg I'm bleeding I've had enough for the year.

I ended up getting second place but Wade Klima he got first and we were all super pumped.

With that I was really happy that I beat Tucker and Bobby again.

It is what it is.

You nailed it!

Me and Wade kind of teamed up here.

I've been giving him a hand and that's what our plan is next year.

To top that and go for over 2000 pounds.

He's so smart and knows what he's doing.

He's did this forever and if he would have kept on growing he'd have a world record I'm sure by now.

Maybe this year next year come on oh yeah 1661 pounds Join us again next season on Common Ground.

Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community Member FDIC.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th 2008.

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