My name is Hank and I have a problem. The problem weighs, as of last Saturday's tape measurement, somewhere in the neighborhood of 480 pounds, and it is sitting in my back yard under a bedsheet, and I have been out to look at it four times today. My wife Carol says I have been out five. She counts.

It started in 1995 with a packet of Atlantic Giant seeds and a bet with my brother-in-law. That first one weighed 96 pounds and I thought I was the king of the county. Then I went to a weigh-off and saw what a real one looked like and a man told me, very kindly, that mine was "a nice one for a first year." That was it. That was the hook going in. 1996: 188. 1997: 260. 1998: 412, which took second at the festival and got my picture in the shopper. This year I am going for five hundred, and if you'd told me in 1995 that I would one day own a hand-pollination brush I would have laughed at you.

For perspective: the world record is over a thousand pounds now. There are men in this hobby, and it is mostly men, and mostly a certain kind of man, who would look at 500 and say "nice one for a fifth year." I know that. I don't care. Five hundred is my Everest and it's growing at the end of a vine 14 feet from the stump.

You cannot grow a giant pumpkin by accident. A jack-o'-lantern pumpkin will never break 50 pounds no matter what you feed it, and an Atlantic Giant left to its own devices will grow six mediocre pumpkins instead of one monster. Everything about this is about making one plant put everything it has into one fruit. Here is what I do, in order.

1. The seed. It has to be the Atlantic Giant variety; that's the one all the big ones come from. Better than a packet is a seed out of a big pumpkin, from a grower who knows what pollinated it. Growers trade seeds like baseball cards. My 1999 plant is from a seed out of a 600-pounder a fellow in Michigan grew, which he traded me for two out of my 412. (Yes, seeds out of a 412 are worth something. Not much. Something.)
2. Start indoors. Late April here. File the edge of the seed lightly so water gets in, soak it a few hours, plant it point down in a big peat pot in warm soil. Bottom heat helps. It's up in about a week.
3. The patch. One plant needs 800 to 1,200 square feet. Read that again. My whole back yard is now the patch and the lawn mower is a decoration. Work in as much manure and compost as you can get the fall before. I bring in two pickup loads from a horse farm every October and Carol's roses have never looked better, so there's that.
4. Set it out mid-May, in a low plastic hoop tunnel or a cold frame, because a late frost or a cold wind will set the plant back two weeks and you don't have two weeks. Take the cover off in June.
5. Train the vine. One main vine, growing straight out from the stump. Secondary vines come off it every couple of feet like a Christmas tree; let those grow out sideways. Tertiary vines (off the secondaries) get pinched off. Otherwise it's a jungle.
6. Bury the vines. This is the big trick nobody outside the hobby knows. Everywhere a leaf comes off the vine, the vine will grow roots into the ground if you cover that joint with a shovel of dirt. Do it along the main vine and the secondaries. A plant with roots every two feet along a 40-foot vine can pull up a LOT more water and food than one with a single root at the stump. It also keeps the wind from flipping the vines.
7. Pollinate by hand. Female flowers have a little bulb (a baby pumpkin) under the blossom; males are on a plain stem. Early in the morning, when a female opens, pull a couple of fresh males, strip the petals off, and rub the pollen on her. Then tie the female flower shut so the bees don't bring in pollen from the neighbor's zucchini. Write down the date.
8. Pick ONE. Let three or four fruits set on the main vine, 10 to 15 feet out from the stump. Watch them ten days. Keep the best-shaped, fastest-growing one and cut off every other pumpkin on the plant, and keep cutting them off all summer. One plant, one fruit. It hurts. Do it.
9. Set the fruit up right. While it's small, gently turn it so the stem comes off the vine at a right angle, so the vine doesn't get pulled as it grows. Put sand or a board under it so it doesn't sit in wet dirt. Leave a little slack in the vine on either side; the fruit's going to lift it.
10. Water like it's a job. Because it is. At peak it can drink 100 gallons a day. Soaker hoses on the buried vines, early morning. Don't let it dry out and don't drown it.
11. Feed. Manure tea, fish emulsion, seaweed, a balanced fertilizer early and then more phosphorus when the fruit sets. Everybody has a secret recipe. Mine is fish emulsion every week and the neighbors know when I've done it.
12. Shade the fruit. A white bedsheet on a little frame over it. Direct sun hardens the skin, and a hard skin can't stretch, and a skin that can't stretch splits. A split pumpkin is a dead pumpkin. Also the sheet makes it look like a ghost in the yard, which has scared two meter readers so far.
13. Measure and pray. Tape measure: around the fat part, over the top side to side, over the top stem to blossom end. Add the three numbers up ("over-the-top" inches) and look on the chart. The chart is a guess. The scale is the truth.

Typed in from the notebook that lives on the nail by the back door. "OTT" is the over-the-top measurement in inches; "est." is what the chart says that means in pounds.

Two things I'd do different: pollinate a week earlier, and bury more of the secondaries in June instead of getting to it in July. Every week you gain in June is 100 pounds in September. Every grower says that. Every grower is right.

Here is a question nobody thinks about until the night before: how do you get 480 pounds of pumpkin from your back yard into a truck without breaking the pumpkin, the truck, or yourself?

The answer is a tarp, six friends and a tractor. What I do (learned from watching better men than me at weigh-offs, and from doing it wrong in 1997):

1. Cut the vine the morning of, leaving a foot or so of stem on each side of the pumpkin. Don't carry it by the stem. Don't even touch the stem. A stem that snaps off means a pumpkin that leaks, and a leaking pumpkin gets disqualified at some fairs and just loses weight at the rest.
2. Roll it onto a heavy tarp. Not roll, exactly. Rock it. Two people ease it up on one side, two others slide the tarp under, ease it back down, then rock it the other way and pull the tarp through. It's like changing sheets with somebody still in the bed.
3. Six people, six handholds on the tarp, lift together on the count of three, walk it to a pallet. Keep it low. Don't be a hero. A 400-pounder is a fridge that rolls.
4. Pallet onto the pickup with the forks on my neighbor Dale's tractor. Dale gets the first pie, if there is a pie (see below). In 1998 we used a backhoe bucket with a blanket in it and it worked, but the pumpkin was never the same shape.
5. Strap it, pad it with old blankets, and drive like there's a sleeping baby in the back. Because some part of you thinks there is.

Moving day is Saturday morning, October 2, 6 a.m. Dale, my brother-in-law (who started all this and has never grown one over 150), two guys from work and my nephew, who has been told there will be donuts. Carol is driving the truck. She insisted. "You'll ride in the back with it," she said, "I know you."

The Buckeye Harvest Festival giant pumpkin weigh-off is Saturday, October 2, at the fairgrounds. Weigh-in from 8 a.m. to noon, results and ribbons around 2. Big scale on the flatbed, a man with a clipboard, and thirty or forty of us standing around trying to look casual while we eyeball each other's tarps. There is a category for largest pumpkin (by weight), largest squash, prettiest pumpkin (which is a real thing and which I have never won and never will, Walter has a lump), and a kids' division that my nephew is entered in with a 31-pounder he grew on my compost pile and is very proud of, as he should be.

Last year's winner at the festival was 511 pounds, so 500 doesn't guarantee anything. But it's the number. It's my number.

If you're anywhere near, come by. Look for the orange thing under the ghost sheet and a man who hasn't slept. I'll post the weight here Saturday night if I can stand up, and Sunday if I can't.

Everybody asks. Here are the options, in the order Carol ranks them.

• Save the seeds. This is the real answer. The seeds from a 480-pound pumpkin pollinated by a known plant are the whole reason next year could be 600. You cut it open (a saw; a knife won't do it), scoop out the seeds, wash them, dry them on screens for a couple weeks, and put them in envelopes marked with the weight and the parents. Then you trade them. Then you spend all winter reading the envelopes.
• Pie. No. I'm sorry. Everybody wants this to be the answer and it isn't. A giant pumpkin is mostly water and it's bland and stringy. You could make a pie, and Carol did in 1996 out of stubbornness, and it was fine, and it took a wheelbarrow to get the pumpkin to the kitchen for a fine pie. The pie pumpkins for pie are the little ones. Dolores over at The Pie Lady uses canned, and if it's good enough for four blue ribbons it's good enough for me.
• Carve it. For Halloween, on the front porch, with a chainsaw, with the neighborhood kids watching. This is what we did with the 412 and it is still talked about. You could fit a third grader inside it. We know because one got in.
• The boat. Some fellows up in Canada and out east hollow the really big ones out and paddle them across a pond in a race. I would need about 700 pounds for that to work with me in it. It is not out of the question for 2001. Carol says it is out of the question.
• Hogs. Dale's hogs get whatever's left after the seeds are out. They can hear the truck coming. It's the happiest afternoon of their year.

Other people with a problem: The Dahlia Diary (Constance grows sixty of something on purpose, so we understand each other) · Betty's Backyard Vegetable Patch (normal-sized vegetables, a fine hobby) · The Compost Pile · Canning Season · Willow Creek Garden Center (where the fish emulsion comes from) · The Henderson Family Home Page

Coming after the weigh-off: THE NUMBER, in letters as big as this page will make them, and pictures, as soon as the roll from the festival is developed and I figure out the scanner my nephew talked me into.