By Chris Aldridge
Kentucky Ag News

Like a mother bear closely watching her cub, Josh Monin kept a keen eye on the forklift as it lowered his prized pumpkin on the scale during the Kentucky State Fair’s Largest Pumpkin Contest.

Dr. Ryan Quarles, Kentucky’s agriculture commissioner who was serving as co-master of ceremonies, held his microphone close to Monin after asking the question everyone was wondering: “How much do you think it weighs?”

“1,313 pounds,” quipped the bearded Caneyville man, which was a pound more than the pumpkin atop the leaderboard, a 1,312.2-pounder grown by defending champion Dwight Slone of Prestonsburg.

Kentucky Commissioner of Agriculture Dr. Ryan Quarles, left, presents Josh Monin of Caneyville with an oversized check for $1,508.20 – a dollar a pound – for his Kentucky-grown pumpkin that won the Kentucky State Fair's Largest Pumpkin Contest Saturday.

The large crowd seated on bleachers in the West Hall of the Kentucky Exposition Center gasped as the scale zoomed past the 1,300s and 1,400s. Cheers erupted as the digital readout settled on 1,508.2 pounds.

Quarles presented Monin with an oversized check for $1,508.20, or a dollar per pound for any pumpkin over 1,000 pounds. He plans to invest the money back into his gardening hobby.

“I usually don’t end up makin’ much money,” Monin said, noting he took another pumpkin, a 1,285-pounder, to Indianapolis earlier this month to win the Indiana State Fair contest. “I usually spend more than I make.”

It was the first time Monin had competed in the Kentucky State Fair’s Largest Pumpkin Contest. “Hopefully, I’ll keep that trend up,” he said of the win.

Monin’s pumpkin has an unusual shape, with the largest circumference (15½ feet) of all the contestants.

“Genetics,” Monin said. “Sometimes you’ll get a real tall pumpkin. Some of them are wider, longer. This one just happened to be squatty.

“Usually when they’re this shape, they go heavy, so that’s what I was countin’ on. I call it ‘Blockhead.’ When it was about 30-40 days old, it was a square. It quit growing around day 65.”

This summer, Monin said he spent “two to three hours a day everyday messin’ with it.

“I do a soil test at the beginning of the year. I amend the soil, but it’s not your basic ‘throw a bag of triple 20 (fertilizer)’ down,” he said, explaining he adds such exotic ingredients as mycorrhizae fungi and bacteria to the soil. “Throughout the season, I fertilize it about every day with microdoses of humic and fulvic acids.”

Monin grows his large pumpkins in the shade because direct sunlight causes them to ripen too early. They also have to be shielded from the wind and hail, and grown on a bed of sand.

“I put a piece of plywood under each pumpkin topped by about three inches of sand,” Monin said. “Sand makes it where, as it grows, it doesn’t tear itself up, it just slides.”

Keeping the pumpkin watered is of paramount importance.

“Back during the drought, we had about 30-40 days with no rain at all,” he said. “At one point – I’ve got three (large pumpkin) plants – I was puttin’ down 600 gallons a day – 200 a plant.

“It’s a process,” he added. “You’ve gotta love it, otherwise you can’t do it.”

Monin said he was “lucky this year” because all three of the large pumpkins he planted survived. “Usually, you lose about half of ‘em,” he noted.

The last pumpkin currently weighs about 1,180 pounds. “Hopefully, it reaches the 12, 13, 14 hundred mark,” he said.

Monin plans to enter it in the pumpkin contest at Robertson Family Farm in Meade County.

Kentuckians held the top three places in the State Fair contest, which included two entries from West Virginia and another from Indiana. Finishing third behind runner-up Slone was a 1,236-pounder grown by Scott Bayuk from Columbia. It won the Howard Dill Award, which honors the most photogenic pumpkin based on its orange color and symmetry in addition to size. The award was named in honor of the Canadian man considered the father of giant pumpkin growing.

Bayuk once grew a 2,346-pound monster that ranked among the top 15 heaviest pumpkins in the world.

In the State Fair’s Largest Watermelon Contest, Frank Mudd from Flaherty, Ky., in Meade County won the blue ribbon at 248.8 pounds. It was the 17th time he had grown the largest watermelon in the past 18 State Fairs. After winning the contest 15 years in a row, Mudd was beaten by Nick McCaslin from Hawesville in 2019. After COVID-19 canceled the 2020 contest, both Mudd and McCaslin tied for the Largest Watermelon last year. McCaslin finished runner-up this year with a 233-pound melon.