SMOKY LAKE - To organizers of the annual Great White North Pumpkin Fair held at Smoky Lake northeast of Edmonton on the first Saturday in October, Don Crews of Lloydminster is a familiar face in the winning circle with the heaviest pumpkin.
This year, for the 33rd annual event, he did it once again, with a nice bright orange pumpkin that tipped the scales at 2,037.5 lbs. At a little over one ton, that’s still a huge pumpkin, but it fell short of his 2022 pumpkin that tipped the scales at 2,537 lbs., which set a new site record and a new Canadian record.
A second pumpkin that he brought along just for display and for sale at the auction following the show also tipped the scales at just over one ton.
We talked with Crews outside the noisy hall while waiting for an opportunity to take photos with just him and the pumpkin, while inside, dozens of people crowded around the huge gourd to have their own photos taken with it.
What did he do that was different this year, we asked?
“Nothing,” was his reply. “I didn’t even touch my soil this year. It still had the skid steer marks when I took the (2022) pumpkin out.”
Crews, who lives and works out of Lloydminster, has a 36-foot greenhouse on his parent’s acreage a few minutes out of town where he grows his pumpkins along with other vegetables.
And obviously, it takes a lot of time and work to keep his pumpkin growing. He said he planted the seed for this year’s pumpkin on April 3 and it germinated on April 9. It is a selection of one of the Atlantic Giant pumpkin varieties.
“After 10 to 15 days, it was way ahead of my pumpkin last year. And then it fell off and it was a bit of a disappointment,” he added.
We asked if the smoke-filled skies during the summer made any difference in the growth of his pumpkin, as it did other crops in the province this year.
“I could tell each day when it was smoky. A couple of times, I wondered if the thing was rotten. Is it dead? Is it still growing?” he replied. “Then it got sunny out, and the smoke cleared for a couple of days, and it just started growing again.”
If it hadn’t been smoky and more sunshine, would this pumpkin have been a new champion?
“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” he said. “Even in the last little bit, when we had a bunch of cloudy, smoky days, it didn’t move much at all.”
To add to the weather problems, a lack of rainfall meant he didn’t have enough rainwater to water his pumpkin, which can consume up to 50 gallons per day. He had to rely on treated city water, so he had to adjust for that as well to lower the pH levels, and that added a lot of extra work.
Speaking of his champion pumpkin last year, Crews said he couldn’t have had a better season. “We didn’t get any rain - not a cloudy day and lots of sunshine. I just hit it right last year.”
As noted, it takes a lot of work, plus planning, to grow a monster pumpkin. “What we try to do is take all the factors that are out of our control and try to take control of them,” he said. “What would I really want to do? Really crazy. I’d have lights all over that greenhouse,” he said, adding they would be LED grow lights.
He has thought about it, and there are no rules against that sort of move. “Just don’t mess with the pumpkin itself. No injections or anything. Besides, the pumpkins are inspected for things like that before the weigh-in, and any signs of anything like that, and the pumpkin is rejected.”
Don Crews has been bringing his big pumpkins to the annual Smoky Lake event since 2001, and in the 22 years since, has taken the championship 11 times, including this year. He first won in 2006 with an 1,884 lbs pumpkin, and again in 2008 with a much smaller pumpkin that weighed just 953.6 lbs. He won again in 2009, 2011, 2014 and again in 2016.
Up to that point, he had not broken the site record for the heaviest pumpkin, but he came through in 2017 with the new site record - a pumpkin that skipped the scales at 1,652 lbs. He broke his own record again in 2018 with a pumpkin weighing 1,884. Crews won the competition again in 2019, with a pumpkin that was just 1,474.5 lbs. Then his 2022 pumpkin entry weighing 2,537 lbs shattered all previous records.
Bringing in big pumpkins isn’t about the money for Crews. Sure, there is a nice plaque and $1,400 in first place prize money for the winning pumpkin, but that doesn’t even cover his expenses. For him, he says it’s about the personal challenge of growing one even bigger, and for sure, he will attempt to beat his own record and the Canadian record again next year.
The annual Great White North Pumpkin festival gathers lots of interest, and the town of Smoky Lake, with a population of a little over 1,000, probably swells to 10 times that during the festival.
While the official weigh-in, which includes long gourd, watermelon and field pumpkins as well as the big pumpkins, draws a large crowd, many also gather downtown for the car show (which took over two blocks of main street plus four side streets this year), a farmer’s market, corn maze, wine and beer tasting, food trucks, and much more.
The second largest single draw of the Saturday portion of the weekend-long event is the pumpkin drop, where a guesstimated 2,000 persons gathered to watch a large pumpkin drop on a well-decorated car from about 90 feet in the air. It’s all over in seconds, but the crowd loves it, and it’s a unique way to end the day.
