A suburban garden grew Illinois’ heaviest pumpkin at 2,021 pounds

Illinois’ heaviest pumpkin was grown right along my normal bike route to Target. (It’s at Pierce & Childs in Wheaton). Illinois is the #1 producer of pumpkins in America. Years ago I suggested the Illinois State Quarter should feature a pumpkin. To grow the heaviest pumpkin in Illinois is a big deal. This is ILLINOIS. Pumpkin Capitol of America!

The pumpkin is almost as tall as me! When I stand next to it, it comes up to my eyes.

Illinois’ heaviest pumpkin was grown right in the town next to me! Like, by a regular house. Not a farm that specializes in these things. Just an everyday house. Every year at the end of summer, you can see giant pumpkins growing in their backyard. They have a corner house, so you can easily see their pumpkins from the street.

In this photo, you can see that they set up the pumpkins right by the sidewalk so anyone can come right up to the pumpkin and interact with it. The front side of the pumpkin felt so COLD. The back side had the sun on it, so it felt warm. Amazing the contrast. It’s like this pumpkin is a living thing—well, actually it was a living thing.

You can also see from this photo that the pumpkin is rather thin on the side. I’m guessing it was grown flat on the ground like a pancake. Then the owners propped it up on the side to make it tall.

I thought of so many questions I would ask if the owner came out.

1. What do you feed it?
2. Do you have a special tent to protect the pumpkin if it’s too hot?
3. Halfway through the pumpkin growing season, did they know that this would be a giant award-winning pumpkin?
4. Do you name your giant pumpkin?
5. Has growing giant pumpkins taught you any unexpected life lessons?
6. How do you carry/move it?
7. What will do with it when the season is over? They have another pumpkin that is 1,931 pounds. So they have about 4,000 pounds of pumpkin!
8. Does it have magical seeds inside that you use to grow next year’s giant pumpkin?

I have a feeling the pumpkin seeds inside this giant pumpkin wouldn’t be any good for growing more giant pumpkins. Something along the lines of this pumpkin is abnormal. An abnormal pumpkin would have abnormal seeds. Nature wouldn’t want tons of giant pumpkins sprouting everywhere. I should just look this up, but I have a feeling that you would use some seeds from a somewhat normal-sized pumpkin to grow these giants. And then, the grower just uses special nurture techniques to make it grow abnormally large.

What will be done with it when the season is over…. In Oregon, they take a bunch of giant pumpkins, carve out the guts, make them into boats, and have a boat race. No joke. People climb INSIDE the pumpkins and race them. Here’s a video.

My mind is so blown by the crossovers in this video.

• Giant pumpkins
• Climbing INSIDE a pumpkin
• Super fun event where people dress up in costumes
• Racing the pumpkins
• The host of the video is none other than Will Cling who hosted “Wild Chicago” from 1992 to 2003. Of course, Will Clinger would be there covering the Giant Pumpkin Regatta.

Speaking of giant foods. This past Monday, Jimmy John’s released the giant pickle sandwich. Instead of bread, the sandwich is between two giant slices of pickle. I’m not joking.

Answers to questions about Illinois’ giant pumpkin

After writing this post, I did some googling and read a bunch of news articles about this large pumpkin. It answered a lot of my questions. I copied and pasted sections from the articles, and put them into groups:

Seeds

Atlantic Giant Pumpkin seeds

He hopes this pumpkin will be the sire to his next great achievement. The seed that grew it came from an 1,850-pound pumpkin Adkins grew last year.

Adkins sells the seeds he doesn’t use on eBay to offset the costs of growing the giant pumpkins. He also offers instructions and gives out his phone number to buyers if they want to text for help.

Care

They grow pretty much 40 to 50 pounds a day at their peak,” said Adkins

“A little bit of pressure is good,” he said. “It keeps me outside where all the hard work is going on. June, July, I’m spending six or seven hours a day out in the yard.”

During their peak growing time, which lasts about a month and a half, Adkins can spend as much as seven hours a day tending to them. Each pumpkin would get about 150 gallons a day of water during this period and “bags and bags and bags of fertilizer,” he said.

He has a friend who has equipment to help him move it.

Results

“The most important one is the weight of this one, and it beat the 2,000-pound mark,” he said. “It’s just ecstatic, and I’m super happy that it was grown off of my own seeds from last year…and it ended up becoming over 2,000, which I’ve been working on. That goal has been in my head for years.”

“That’s one of the things I’m most proud of,” he said. “I was super excited that was the one that broke the 2,000-pound mark.”

He took home first place in the Illinois Giant Pumpkin Growers Association weigh-off in Minooka — for the third year in a row. The seven-time state champion said his interest began more than a decade ago and knows the pressure is on to break his own record.

Adkins now has his sights set on beating the state record of 2,145 pounds set in 2015. It’s the same 150-ish-pound gap range he had when he aimed for 2,000.

Where

At Pierce Avenue and Childs Street in Wheaton, Illinois

Who

Joe Adkins

Adkins started growing giant pumpkins in 2008 when he wanted a bigger canvas for his pumpkin-carving hobby. Though he says it was tough at first, Adkins by 2010 had grown a 579-pounder, and he was hooked.

Read more about Joe in this 2023 West Suburban Living interview. There’s so much good stuff in here, I would just copy the entire article.

What happens to the pumpkin afterward

Adkins plans to carve the giant pumpkin closer to Halloween. He’s already thinking about next year’s weigh-off competition.

Adkins says after that, he will take out the seeds and compost them for nutrients to help with next season’s pumpkins.

Adkin’s record last year was 1,850 pounds. After carving, the contents of that pumpkin were dumped back into his yard for compost.

“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “It gets chopped up into pieces and we put it in the backyard in the compost and after a couple of those really good hard freezes, hard frost, they just flatten out by spring—there’s nothing left anymore,” he said.

While giant pumpkins don’t really have any flavor, Adkins said his pumpkins could make anywhere between 500 and 1,000 pies.

Sources:

• Wheaton man grows largest pumpkin in Illinois | Fox 32 Chicago | 2022
• Suburban man wins state title for 2,000 pound pumpkin | NBC 5 Chicago | 2024
• ‘Best day ever’: Wheaton man grows 2,000-pound pumpkin | Daily Herald | 2024

---

I’m curious about the water. He says that in the peak growing time of 45 days, he uses 150 gallons of water per pumpkin every day. My Glen Ellyn water bill is $10.12 per 1,000 gallons.

150 gallons would cost $1.518 every day. $1.518 over 45 days is $68.31. Remember, that’s PER PUMPKIN. He says he grows three large pumpkins a year. He would pay about $204.93 in water each summer. Ok, not bad. My water bill can easily jump $100 when I water my lawn regularly in the summer.

Now how about the length of time to water each pumpkin every day.

A typical garden hose flow rate is usually between 9 and 17 gallons per minute. The average garden hose GPM would be around 12 to 13 GPM. Let’s go with 13 GPM. 150 gallons would be 11.5 minutes. And he has three pumpkins, so he’s running his hose for 34.5 minutes a day.

---

Here are a couple more photos of the pumpkin in Wheaton.