Garden City pumpkin grower squashes Kansas State Fair record on first try

Kansas has a new pumpking.

Or King Pumpkin, if you prefer.

Garden City’s Donovan Mader broke a state record this year with his submission to the giant pumpkin contest at the Kansas State Fair. His monster, which he grew in his abandoned horse pen from a seed he purchased for $25 online, broke the previous state record set in 2007.

That pumpkin, grown by Brian Stanley, weighed in at 976.2 pounds. Mader’s 1,034-pounder beat it by 57.8 pounds.

“There’s a lot of luck involved,” said Mader, who restores classic trucks for a living.

The winner, now attracting long lines of gawkers in the Kansas State Fair’s Pride of Kansas building, is Mader’s first entry in the giant pumpkin division, which has been previously dominated by pumpkin growing experts Ryan Grabman of Wichita and Doug Heathman of Liberal.

Mader said he doesn’t remember when he first became interested in growing giant pumpkins, but he’s been trying for years at his home in Garden City. The biggest gourd he ever grew, using giant pumpkin seeds he bought at Wal-Mart, was only about 70 pounds.

This year, he went online in search of seeds and bought four or five at $25 each. He started them inside in April, afraid the frost wasn’t finished, then moved them outside in May, planting them in the pens where he had horses until five or six years ago. That, combined with his sandy soil and an unusually wet summer in western Kansas, may have made the difference, he said.

“I had two plants with pumpkins on them, but the other pumpkin, I don’t know what happened to it,” he said. “It got soft on the bottom and just kind of rotted away. This one held on. It did good for me.”

It grew. And grew and grew. By September, Mader said, he knew he might have a winner. He measured it, did the calculations, and figured it could be more than 1,000 pounds.

During the growing season, Mader had contacted longtime champ Heathman, seeking advice. Heathman gave him growing tips and also agreed to loan him his “pumpkin swing,” a special device used to get pumpkins from the field into a pickup bed. A local auction house owner loaned Mader a loader.

The drive from Garden City to Hutchinson last week was interesting with the gourd on board, Mader said.

“It sure draws attention,” he said. “Every place I stopped, people at gas stations asked if it was real and if they could touch it.”

The fair had eight giant pumpkin entries this year, said Gene Algrim, superintendent of the agriculture department for the Kansas State Fair.

The second-place pumpkin was grown by Grabman but was less than half the size of Mader’s pumpkin, weighing in at just over 500 pounds.

Last weekend, the line to get a glimpse of the big pumpkin stretched across the Pride of Kansas building, almost to the butter sculpture, Algrim said.

“It’s an interesting thing to see,” he said. “It’s not worth anything, but people like to see it.”

The giant pumpkin is worth the $300 in prize money, which more than covers Mader’s seed costs. He’ll pick his pumpkin up when the fair ends this weekend and is trying to find out if anyone in Garden City wants to display it. Though a giant pumpkin is no good for pies, he said, it would make for a pretty impressive jack-o’-lantern.

“If you keep it out of the sun, it should make it into Halloween,” he said.

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 6:33 AM with the headline "Garden City pumpkin grower squashes Kansas State Fair record on first try."