Serious squash returns to downtown Winslow

Published 9:00 am Saturday, October 24, 2015

“You waiting for Linus?” asked a passerby in the parking lot of Town & Country Market.

“Yeah,” Joel Holland laughed, sitting on the bed of his truck next to his latest agricultural behemoth — a giant pumpkin that tipped the scales at 1,030 pounds. “We’ve got the great pumpkin, now we just need the rest of the characters.

“Everyone likes the big pumpkins,” he chuckled.

Holland, a retired firefighter, is a Puyallup-based farmer who specializes in giant pumpkins. He’s had his weighty wares purchased for display by major league sports teams, Paul Allen, the restaurant atop the Space Needle, Elysian Brewery in Seattle and Johansson Clark Real Estate, who have made the nearly annual arrival of the great gourd to their downtown Winslow office a much-loved community tradition.

So it was again this year that, just before lunch time Monday, with the assistance of a forklift driver from the ferry shipyard and a police escort, this year’s sizable squash came to Bainbridge.

Holland said that, despite the record-setting dry summer, “It was a good growing season.”

Giant pumpkins, he explained, actually do better in the hot weather, though a bit more rain would have been nice. At the peak of their growth cycle, Holland said his largest pumpkins can gain 30 to 40 pounds a day for as long as two weeks.

The average pie, he added, contains about two pounds of pumpkin, meaning the giant outside Johansson Clark Real Estate could make about 515 pies.