Two New Hampshire Retirees, 79 and 86, Grew an 837-Pound Pumpkin Named ‘Large Marge’ With Help From a UNH Plant Breeder

Jim Cross is 79. Daniel Reich is 86. This year the two neighbors at Brookdale Spruce Wood, a senior living community in Durham, New Hampshire, grew an 837-pound pumpkin and named her “Large Marge,” Parade reported on Nov. 13, citing reporting by WMUR.

Large Marge did not win on weight alone. At the Deerfield Fairgrounds she placed seventh in the heaviest pumpkin category, took first place for prettiest, and earned the Howard Dill Award.

A gardener, a baker and an engineer

According to Parade entertainment writer Geca Flores, Cross grew up gardening. Reich is a bread baker and outdoors enthusiast who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. The pair began planning the project in 2025, and their seedlings went into the ground in June 2026.

They were not working alone. The two went looking for help from the University of New Hampshire, where Dr. Chris Hernandez is an assistant professor of plant breeding. “They just came and found me,” Hernandez told WMUR, as quoted by Parade.

The team also had advice from Steve Geddes, a giant pumpkin grower from Boscawen, New Hampshire. “This sure sounded like it would be a really fun thing to do,” Geddes said, according to Parade.

Large Marge was not their only pumpkin. The others were named Dolly Plumpton and Gourdon Lightfoot.

The UNH program behind the help

Hernandez leads one of the oldest pumpkin and squash programs in the country. The UNH College of Life Sciences and Agriculture says its cucurbit breeding and genetics program was founded in the 1940s and is the longest continuously running plant breeding program of its kind in North America. It has developed more than 100 varieties of squash, pumpkins, gourds and melons, and its work runs through the Macfarlane Research Greenhouses, Kingman Research Farm and Woodman Horticultural Research Farm.

UNH Magazine reported that Hernandez took over work built by longtime plant biology professor Brent Loy, who taught at UNH from 1967 until his death in 2020. Seeds licensed to companies including Johnny’s Selected Seeds and High Mowing Organic Seeds have earned the university $1.6 million in royalties since 2015, the magazine said.

A mentor who once grew North America’s heaviest

Geddes knows the Deerfield scales well. In 2018 he brought a 2,528-pound pumpkin to the Deerfield Fair, and the Concord Monitor reported it was the heaviest pumpkin in North American history at the time and the second-heaviest ever grown anywhere.

UNH Extension’s write-up of that season gives a sense of how fast giant pumpkins grow. At the end of July that year, Geddes’s champion was gaining 52 pounds a day. He grows in sand to drain water away from the roots, and the extension piece noted that growth slows sharply once nighttime temperatures fall below the 60s and can stop entirely in a cold snap. Growers track size with a circumference and two diameter measurements, using five-day averages because a half inch of tape placement can throw a single day off.

The same extension article noted that 14 growers in the New Hampshire Giant Pumpkin Growers’ Association keep traps for squash vine borers, one of the biggest threats to a giant pumpkin vine.

What the Howard Dill Award recognizes

An 837-pound pumpkin is small by world-record standards, but the award Large Marge won is about something other than weight. A Brookdale Spruce Wood Facebook post quoted by Parade described the Howard Dill Award as honoring the “ideal characteristics of a giant pumpkin variety, including its shape, color, symmetry, and overall appearance.”

For a first-year team with a combined age of 165, a seventh-place finish by weight, a first for prettiest and that award made for a strong debut. Other giant pumpkin results this fall have been heavier, including Carol and Dave Stelts’s 2,565.5-pound winner in Canfield, Ohio and Travis Gienger’s 2,389-pound champion at Half Moon Bay. Few of those growers can say their crop was a joint project between a retired engineer, a lifelong gardener and a university plant breeder.

This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Nick Ares – CC BY-SA 2.0/Wikimedia Commons