St. Andrews by the Lake

Imagine stopping at a traffic light and seeing a ½ ton pumpkin filling the back end of the pick up truck in front of you. Next to you is a flatbed truck with 2 more of the giant pumpkins. That means you are probably on the road to the Frerich farm the day before the giant pumpkin weigh off. I just finished a great book that chronicles the growing of these giants and the culture that surrounds it. In Backyard Giants, author Susan Warren follows the quest of a group of Rhode Island pumpkin growers to break the 1500 lb threshold and set a new world record. The book is filled with tales of midnight trips out to the patch to wrap pumpkins in comforters, elaborate heating systems to extend the growing season, and searches for just the right seeds to create the biggest and best. The giants would make Jack of the beanstalk proud, growing at a rate of 25-30 lbs a day by August. Incredibly, a forklift was needed to lift these grossly misshapen pumpkins onto the trucks at weigh off time. A far cry from the pumpkins we make into pies. We humans sure have this insatiable need to change things, or at least try to make them bigger and better.  Sometimes these changes are comical (like pumpkins the size of Cinderella’s carriage), sometimes not so much. We’ve even figured out a way to make square watermelons so they fit on the shelf in the refrigerator neatly.

All this got me to thinking about our response to the creation story in Genesis (1:26-28) where we are given “dominion over…every living thing that moves upon the earth.” I think we prefer ‘stewardship’ rather than ‘dominion’ today because it steers us away from the temptation to conquer- we’ve pretty well messed that up in the past. Have we moved too far from our roots? I think we need to continually ask ourselves what does it mean to be stewards of ‘every living thing that moves upon the earth’? What does this mean to us as christians? How do we respond to this charge? How does our response need to change over time? How do we individually and collectively act? What are the consequences of our actions? What are the consequences of our inactions? How do we grow our own understanding of good stewardship? In our Creation Liturgy, we have been praying to the Great Spirit to: ‘Make us wise so that we may understand what you have taught us. Help us to learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.’

An interesting thing happened as the giant pumpkin story unfolded. When the growers first started out, they were solely interested in protecting their pumpkins, without considering the costs- usually by bombarding them with pesticides,or building cumbersome protective shelters from the elements. As time went on though, the growers started to work with the soil rather than killing it. They replaced pesticides with things like compost tea, and moving their crops around, replenishing the soil with manure and compost. One farmer did some research into a ‘no till’ method, mimicking what happens in the forests, building on layers of new organic matter to supply nutrients for new plants. In other words, over years of working in the dirt, the growers began to work with the natural world rather than against it.

The Rhode Island pumpkin growers freely admit that their quest stems from an obsession. And as with all obsessions, things tend to get a little out of hand. One of the growers, Joe, has decided to expand his interests- he brought in a gourd that was 126 ½ inches long  and it won first prize.