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This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. There's some of our favorites, and today we have a story from Rhode Islander Joe Jutras. Joe is a retired cabinet maker, and since his retirement, he has dedicated most of his time to growing giant fruit and vegetable.
In 2017, he broke the record for the largest green squash ever grown, coming in at 2,118 pounds. Here's Joe with his story. I've been growing giant vegetables now for the last 25 years. Got started years ago just by accident. I started growing vegetables in my backyard.
I threw in a giant pumpkin seed. I grew it to 124 pounds, and from then on I was hooked. A couple of years later, I get hooked up with a gentleman here in Rhode Island. His name is John Castellucci. He's like the godfather of pumpkin growing here in New England.
He started in the early ninety s. He had great success. Real gentleman, helped anybody that wanted to learn how to grow pumpkins.
So my friend Steve Sperry and I, we we spent a lot of time in his house, just drinking some beers and learning how to grow pumpkins and. From then on, we just got hooked and enjoyed growing. Met people from all over the world. This hobby attracts people from all strains of life, from cabinet makers to scientists. There seems to be an addictive quality to growing these giant fruits and vegetables.
It's remarkable how many people you meet that all have the same interest of growing fruit and just enjoy being outside, growing these large vegetables. It's been one of the best parts. I know my wife really enjoys it. We have get-togethers. We have cruises that we go on with pumpkin people.
It's very competitive, but then again. It's such a a long season. We we start these fruit in beginning of April, and we're not finished a lot of these wayoffs until October.
So, you know, you've got a fruit on the hook for like one hundred, one hundred and ten, one hundred twenty days. That that's a long time to have a fruit being healthy, and a lot of things can happen. A lot of weather related problems you can run into, and bugs and diseases and. It takes a lot to get a pumpkin to the finish line.
So when we go to these wayoffs, we're all happy for each other just to to see everybody getting a fruit there. And a lot of people grow multiple fruit just so that you do have a fruit at the wayoff time. Hopefully, to get the full advantage of your growing season, you want to try to get these in probably about three or four weeks before your last frost. Which means you have to grow them in a greenhouse. We use heating cables to warm up the soil.
We use lights. We use like a small greenhouse. My greenhouses are like a five by seven. After we got the pumpkin going, I'd say we've grown them in that greenhouse for probably four or five weeks. It's probably about the first week of May by the time we take it out here in Rhode Island, and the race is on.
We're growing these plants. You're trying to set this fruit out. On the main vine, probably ten to twelve feet, at least, preferably fourteen to sixteen feet is even better. You get probably ten side vines on either side of the fruit, and you plant probably five hundred square feet, four hundred square feet at pollination time, and by that time. Your fruit at twenty days old is really starting to put on the weight.
You could be putting anything on, like maybe thirty pounds a day at at twenty days old, and by twenty five days old you could be putting thirty pounds on, and by forty days you could be putting forty or fifty pounds on if if you know you've really got one hooked up. I was fortunate enough to, in two thousand and six, grow a world record longboard. Actually, the very first time I. I tried. I I grew a world record, and the year after that, two thousand seven, I had started a new garden.
I I grew the world record pumpkins, and ever since then, I was trying to grow the world's largest green squash. It's a different. It's similar to a pumpkin, but the color is different. Just a little different in growing them. The earlier ones, back in two thousand seven, two thousand eight, they were harder to grow.
I think what happened—the gene pool was so closely related that they had a lot of problems with pollinations, and there weren't as many people growing them. There's like nine, nine times more people growing giant pumpkins than there are squash. This hobby of giant fruit growing turns out to be quite the science. But a little over the last decade, some people wanted to make their chances of growing a giant green squash a little higher. And after a few years of crossbreeding squashes and pumpkins, there are a lot more people growing giant green squash.
Part of the reason this type of fruit is so difficult to grow is that pumpkins and the color orange are actually dominant.
So the growers will take the seeds from the squash pumpkin hybrid and plant multiple seeds in hopes to grow a green squash, in which they have a one in four chance of getting one. These giant fruits that are being grown have gone through lots of breeding and pollinating seasons in order to become these world record-breaking 2,000-pound monster produce. Before these large fruits are brought to scale, the growers try to estimate just how much they will weigh. We have a way of measuring these fruits so we have an idea how heavy they are. I call it OTT.
It's over the top measurement. Where you take a circumference measurement, side to side measurement, front to back measurement, you add them all up, and you know you may come up to four hundred and eighty, five hundred inches, and you put that measurement up against a chart, and the chart is changing all the time depending on how heavy the pumpkins get, and it'll give you an estimate of how much your pumpkin should weigh by the cubic inches of your pumpkin.
So you have an idea how many pounds is growing? Pretty exciting when you can gain three hundred pounds a week, two hundred and eighty pounds a week. And you've been listening to Joe Jutras telling the story about his retirement hobby, which has grown into a pretty serious hobby and a world record-breaking hobby. And my goodness, what it takes to grow one of these monsters! How complex it is!
All the exigencies of surviving through a hundred and twenty-day growth season, and that's a long time to get from beginning to end. As he put it, it takes a lot to get a pumpkin that size to the finish line. When we come back, more of Joe Jutris's story, the giant pumpkin and squash grower from Rhode Island, here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation.
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Next day on Hulu. And we continue with our American stories, and with Joe Dutros, who holds the world record for growing the largest green squash. He's been sharing with us all that goes into growing these giant fruits and vegetables. Let's return to Joe. You can actually see that pumpkin growing, especially at the beginning.
Between day day 20 to day 40, it changes the shape daily and triples, quadruples in size in that amount of time. Once they start getting bigger, you know, every inch is like 10, 10, 11, 12 pounds.
So they don't change as much. They like anybody else. They get more more cracks and age spots and. Just about, and they they seem to gain more weight as they get older too. Just like anybody else, you know, they start packing on the weight.
Just very rewarding to to see a fruit grow and get it to the scale, and you know, watch other people have their pumpkin come to the scale, and they're thinking it's you know, say thousand pounds, and it ends up being eleven hundred and fifty pounds.
Well, they. They grew quite a bit over the scale. You know, they're double-digit heavy, so that's great. They adjust this chart all the time so that they're either five percent over or five percent below, trying to be as accurate as they can. In Joe Dutra's first attempt to grow his world record-breaking green squash, he grew twelve plants, and out of the twelve, only one was green.
And it grew to a mere one thousand two hundred fifty-two pounds. But in twenty seventeen, when he tried again with a different seed, it brought him his world record-breaking green squash of two thousand one hundred and eighteen pounds. In the year I grew the world record squash. You know, you have a very good idea. You've got a good one growing, and that same year, Scott Holbitt grew that same 1844 seed.
So we both had one going, and you know, your friends, you talk with one another and say, "Gee, how you doing, Scott? I'm doing, you know, close to 1,900 pounds." You say, "You be trying to do the math, all right? Mine's, mine's close to 2,000 pounds. I, I think I taped out measuring like 2,009 pounds.
So if he's taping 1,9 In 2017, after a long season of hard work growing these giant produce, the weigh-in day arrived. And getting these fruits to weigh-in is quite the process and takes a team effort. It's called Fat Friday, the day before our way off. It's usually on a Saturday. We help help each other out.
There's four or five guys that get together, and we have a tripod with a harness on that goes around the bottom of the pumpkin. You have a chain fall, and you you're able to lift the pumpkin up by this harness from the tripod without actually having to lift any weight whatsoever. And these fruit now are so big that you have to have a Trailer, because they won't fit in the back of a pickup truck any longer.
So we pick it up in the air. We push the trailer underneath. We let it down, hook it up to the truck, and we pull it out. We we bring it to the the farm we have this way off in Warren, Rhode Island, Farish's farm. We set up things for the following day.
We usually wait till the end. We weigh the the biggest ones last by the measurement. Go by how it goes, and just that. Day I won the world record, I was fortunate. I had the biggest fruit there, and it ended up weighing the heaviest.
I was very surprised that it went five percent heavy because you know I was just hoping for something that could beat eighteen forty-four, which was the world record.
So to really come in twenty-one eighteen, it was a dream come true. That's for sure, to say the least. It's going to be a hard record to beat because that was. That was a very, very large fruit. Even nowadays, that at the time that was the thirteenth largest fruit ever grown, pumpkins and squash.
Now since then, there's probably about another thirty or forty ones that are as big or bigger than that. But there's not really any green squash that have come close to that, other than my 1935. There is no doubt seeing these giant pumpkins or squash on the road would be a sight to see.
Well, the funny part of this is when you're going down the road, because some some of these wayoffs we go to are in upstate Connecticut near the New York line, and you're on 95, and you've got people taking pictures and hanging out the windows and. Putting their thumbs up and almost running you off the road—it's that—that's the scary part. Is when you got people—they're not watching where they're going, and they're you know they're really excited and they're taking pictures and they're beeping their horns. Everyone enjoys a large pumpkin going down the road.
Some people probably have never seen it before, and they're really in awe when they do see it.
So that's the part that's. Exciting, and you get to the way off, and you have families and kids that look at it, and it's like a Christmas tree, a big pumpkin. You know, it's it's something everybody enjoys looking at. There's a pumpkin organization called the GPC, and they're something like government of the pumpkin growers. The GPC is the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth.
The organization that makes sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to growing and measuring these giant fruits and vegetables.
So it's very important that we do have a GPC to control the pumpkin community, and that everybody is judged fairly. And we have a yearly convention. That's put on by the GPC, and that's a good time where everyone gets together. It's usually about two, three hundred people from all over the world. We give out awards, and usually the growers who grow the largest squash, or fruit, or vegetables, depending on what it is, they do.
PowerPoint presentation, and everyone learns from you know what the newest strategies were, how they did it, what what not to do, what to do. It's just as important as what to do as what not to do. What you can learn from other people's mistakes, you certainly don't want to make them all yourself. The best thing about this hobby is the friends that you meet. I think it's you know, I enjoy fishing too, and I've got a bunch of fishing buddies that I really enjoy fishing.
Where you know, can't wait to talk about the fish we caught and how to catch them and what to use. It's basically the same thing when you're growing giant pumpkins. What are you using the fertilizer? What are you using the spray? What are you using for fungicides?
What do you think of this seed? What do you think of that seed? What are you growing next year? How'd you do it? It's just really a lot of friendship too.
It's not only the work of growing them. It's people you meet and the friends you you acquire over the years. It's just just so much fun. Joe Jutris is now in his 60s, and he has no intention of stopping his hobby anytime soon. You know, God willing, if I'm still fit, and this this sport really really keeps you moving.
You know, you're out there first thing, crack of dawn, working on these plants, stretching and moving and up and down, and it's quite a bit of physical work to it. I'd like to do it as long as I can. I I know my buddy Eddie, who I'm helping now. He's 83, and he likes growing these fruit as much as anybody I know, and he he just can't wait to get up in the morning to get out there and work on them. Granted that you know at eighty-three you're not able to do it as well as you can at forty or fifty or sixty, but he still still does a heck of a job at it.
I know it's not for everybody. It's quite a bit of work. Not everybody has to take it quite as serious as a competitive pumping grower. Just to grow one in your backyard, to have a two or three hundred pounder on your step is a great achievement over the summer, and it's very attainable now with the seeds we have. Just about everybody has room for a ten by fifteen foot garden, and you could easily grow two, three, five hundred pound fruit without a heck of a lot of work.
I think. And a great job, as always, by Faith and Robbie, telling the story of Joe Jutris. And my goodness, what a passion he has! And my goodness, how many of us have a world record in anything? And if it's the squash world record, so be it twenty one hundred and eighteen pounds done in twenty seventeen.
And Joe's pride and joy, but still out there competing and wanting to win, and most importantly, sharing his hobby with pals. And that's what it really is all about. We all have those hobbies, and what really brings us together is more than the passion for the thing, but the people we meet and the friendships we make. Joe Jutris's story here on our American stories. Looking for a new way to take control of your health?
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See website for details. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way. The twenty twenty six semi quincentennial coin and medal program. From the United States Mint, it celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov/semiq. That's usmint.gov/semiq. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I'm Nicole Hourback, and I'm Joshua Perry.
We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football. Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now. Upgrade to Elite Checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 3.5% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with Early Pay.
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