Competitive pumpkin growing

Thank you, Jim. And by the way, it is lovely outside this morning. Out in the garden with David Whitwam from Whitwam Organics. We sent you down a pumpkin rabbit hole because, and actually, I will say that Laura started this. She said, we need to ask David Whitwam about this. And she's not even out here to do it, but I am conveying her questions to you. And what we're talking about is, we had some video earlier in the week of this award-winning giant pumpkin. And it was grown by a man named Travis Ganger, or Ganger, I'm not sure. He won the 2026 Safeway World Championship pumpkin weigh-off in Half Moon Bay, California, with a 2,389-pound pumpkin that is named Rocky. I don't even think that's the record, though. Okay, all right. I read the record is over 3,000 pounds, like overall record. Really? Okay. I'm not sure where it was grown. I know it wasn't grown in Florida. Over 3,000 pounds, and that actually weighs more than any other food crop ever grown. Really? Yeah. All right. How does one grow a pumpkin that big? You just fertilize it. No, come on. Come on. Okay. So our Halloween pumpkins are a different species than these that they're growing as the giant. So the species that we grow for our jack-o'-lanterns, that's pepo is the species name, and that's closer related to like a zucchini. Okay. Okay. So these are Maxima, so Cucurbita Maxima. So it is a different species grown for size. It's called the Atlantic Giant. And on top of that, these grown for excessive, excessive size are a specific pedigree. So the seeds are very valuable. So it's genetics. It's not just about fertilizers. It's genetics, location, soil, all that stuff. So the seeds inside of these gigantic pumpkins are valuable for growing? They become very valuable, yes. Really? So if you want to grow a really giant pumpkin, you need to get seeds from a really giant pumpkin. Now, could something that big be grown here? Right. So I think our record in Florida is over 1,000 pounds, right? So I did research on where pumpkins are grown in Florida. Jack-o'-lanterns are Halloween. pumpkins are grown like north central Florida and up and there's actually some you pick jack-o'-lantern farms about an hour or two hours from Tampa um like i found some in like Dunnellon and Morriston area so if you want to go to a you pick but again different species so these giant ones and what i found really interesting because pumpkins north Florida and the records for the biggest the biggest pumpkin was south of here in Bradenton and i was like wait that doesn't make any sense So but it did when I found out when they were harvesting it. What's that? What is that? They were harvesting them in May Okay, so they actually start growing them like Bradenton and South for these Florida records in January Okay, right. So they're like skipping the summer heat and our summer weather all together. Okay, and that's really The our Achilles heel in Florida is that heat and humidity and rain and all that stuff that happens over summer so that's why it's really hard for us to grow stuff like that because they have to be started so far back into summer for this fall harvest okay right so they kind of tweak the season backward a little bit thank you for doing this great explanation now before we go we only have a few seconds left what are we checking in on we were checking there on Roselle our true Florida fall crop that's actually from Africa the genetics of these probably came from the Caribbean but you can see our Roselle is just now starting to bud out so there's a few different cultivars of this. Some people might have different ones that started way back in September that started producing the flowers. These are going to flower, they're going to drop the bud, and then they're going to swell, and they're going to make those wonderful calyces that we use for our Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. Hey, thank you. This was fun this morning. That was great. Laura, did you get it all? I did. I did. Thank him for answering. I can keep going. I bet he could. I bet he could. But it's interesting to know, because we were wondering those are huge pumpkins my biggest takeaway my biggest takeaway on it is the seeds yeah pedigree and they that was my biggest takeaway on this i know i know basically if you want a big old pumpkin you gotta get big old pumpkin seeds All right, Russell. We'll see you when you get done. Tell David, hey, for me.