A harvest of pandemic pumpkins

When the pandemic hit this spring, two former Montana State University-Northern college roommates, Jim Elliot and Andy Kueffler, who have families in Havre, decided they wanted to grow pumpkins.

Their goal was to see who could grow the largest pumpkins. They searched the internet for seeds for giant pumpkins to make the competition spectacular.

Andy started his pumpkin plants inside in May and then planted outside in June.

Jim started his inside in March to early April and then transplanted them the third week of April to a cold box to keep them from freezing.

Watering and fertilizing became their summer entertainment. Jim used a Gainer product 10-20-30 to water his pumpkins about once a week.

As the summer went on, the two friends would check in with each other and, some evenings, would sit and watch the pumpkins grow as they imbibed a few liquids.

Jim thinned his pumpkins out to a select few, clipping any extra pumpkins that formed. He planned to only have two pumpkins, one per plant, but missed one and ended up with three pumpkins on that plant.

Their sons are friends and, one day, Andy's son came home and said, "Dad, Jim's pumpkin is bigger."

Andy immediately went out and fertilized his with Miracle Gro.

The pumpkins grew and grew, and then, one night, Havre's deer population thought they would have a little bite out of Jim's big pumpkin. Jim tried to catch the incident on camera, but much to his dismay, the batteries were dead so he did not have digital proof of the guilty deer.

He patched the hole up and sort of covered the pumpkin to protect it from more deer intrusion to let it keep growing.

When it came time to harvest their pandemic pumpkins, with the help of a measurement calculator on the internet, they measured the size of each pumpkin and estimated the weight of the pumpkins off those measurements. Jim's largest pumpkin came out the winner at 350 pounds and Andy's came out at 142 pounds - but both the size of great pandemic pumpkins.