Charlie Lopresti claimed the state record for the largest pumpkin at the recent Damariscotta Pumpkinfest. It weighed 2,365.5 pounds. Photo courtesy of Charlie Lopresti

Charlie Lopresti will say, “Try looking at a pumpkin and not smile. It’s impossible.” Lopresti is the chief meteorologist at CBS 13 and FOX23. He also now holds the record for the largest pumpkin grown in Maine. Lopresti took the top prize at the annual contest at the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest this month. His pumpkin weighed 2,365.5 pounds – smashing the previous record by more than 200 pounds. At the peak of the season, he said it was growing 58 pounds every single day.

Lopresti said he plans to take next year off from the competition, but he took a few minutes to talk about his historic win.

The record-breaking pumpkin emerged as a flower on June 20. At the season peak, it was growing an average of 58 pounds per day. Photo courtesy of Charlie Lopresti

How did you get into pumpkin growing?

I started growing pumpkins with my father in the mid-1980s. We grew field pumpkins, but one year he ended up buying a package of Atlantic giant pumpkin seeds, which is the variety that produces the real big ones. I must have been 12 years old or so, and we grew a 100- or 200-pound pumpkin, and we never weighed it, but I remember thinking that it was enormous. I was kind of hooked on how fast it grew.

When I was in high school and college, I worked on a farm. One of my jobs was to cultivate and grow about 10 acres of pumpkins. They were just the field pumpkins, the jack-o-lantern pumpkins that we get at the farm stand. I’ve always enjoyed growing things because of that, and that’s probably one of the reasons I got into weather because you need interesting weather for these big things to grow. Fast forward years later, my wife and I bought a piece of land from a dairy farmer in Buxton, and we had a nice plot of land to grow a big garden on. We grow about 100 tomato plants every year. We have a strain of family heirloom tomatoes that my father and I keep going, so that’s our primary thing that we’ve grown over the years. But after a while growing tomatoes gets kind of boring when you get to see what the giant pumpkins do.

I was fortunate enough to get hooked up with some of the members of the Maine Giant Pumpkin Growers Organization, which is a club we have here in Maine dedicated to growing giant pumpkins, and they gave me some seeds one year. We have a website – mainepumpkins.com – and the growers are a really nice group of people. It was after the Cumberland Fair in 2007 or 2008.

My first year, I grew a 230-pound pumpkin, and the next year I grew a 700-pound pumpkin, and the next year, I grew a 1,300-pound pumpkin. Every year, you raise the bar.

Twenty-sixteen is when the lightbulb went off for me. I was like, all right, I’m going to break the state record. I knew it was possible. So we’ve been after that for eight years.

What do you need to be able to grow a giant pumpkin?

There’s three things that really help. No. 1, the most important thing, is you need a good seed, a seed that has the genetics that is going to produce the real big ones. You’re not going to try to grow a field pumpkin and hope for a 1,000-pound pumpkin. So No. 1 is a good seed. No. 2 is you need some good soil. It’s really important to have good amended soil. I use manure and compost, something with a lot of nutrients. For these plants that are heavy feeders, it’s important to have good nutrients in your soil and really healthy soil too, with good biology. The final thing is luck. You need good luck. There’s so many things that can go wrong during a season, and I’ve had them happen to me. In 2009, we had a tornado touch down three miles from my house, and we got the wind damage from that storm, and we lost all of our pumpkins that year. One year we had hail damage where our leaves looked like Swiss cheese because we had nickel-sized hail. So weather is important, and severe weather can end the game and end your season in five minutes. So luck is a big part of it. In general, as far as weather goes, this summer was perfect for growing. It was beautiful. Every day was warm. Nights were warm. I was able to control the irrigation. Compare that to the summer we had prior to that, in 2023, it was wet and cold, and the pumpkin plants don’t really love that. So that was really bad luck, I thought.

Do you think your expertise as a meteorologist helps you in growing giant pumpkins or growing generally?

Charlie Lopresti started growing pumpkins with his dad as a kid and has been chasing the state record since 2016. Photo courtesy of Charlie Lopresti

A lot of people say that. They say, well, you have an edge. My answer to that is that I don’t know that I do. I feel like we’re all in the same boat. If there is any edge that a meteorologist might have is I feel pretty confident when I know there might be a frost or a freeze in the forecast, and that’s on both ends of the season. Our pumpkin plants are out in the pumpkin patch the final week in April, and I’ve actually had it snow on top of my plants, which are in a mini greenhouse with heaters. Then a fall frost and freeze, that will get you too. Last night was our first hard freeze at our house, and sometimes you can get them early in September, and that’s important to know. The other thing I’ve been really trying to focus on is the dew point, how dry it is and how humid it is. I used to really focus on water and say, OK, we’re going to get 150 gallons of water per plant per day. That’s how much water you really need for these plants. But I’m noticing some days, it’s really, really dry. The dew point is like 54 degrees or something, and you’re getting a lot of evaporation from the soil. On those days, it’s important to water a little more. Maybe 200 gallons of water per plant per day.

What’s the relationship between the growers?

The relationship couldn’t be better between the growers, I think. I think they’re some of the nicest people I know, and without the growers trading secrets, trading seeds, we would not be able to advance the hobby as far as we have. You’d think that there would be some secretive element or hoarding of seeds, and there really isn’t any of that in Maine.

The gentleman whose record was broken, his name is Edwin Pierpont. He came right over and gave me a handshake, and he said, “It’s going to be a tough one to break.” But I know in his mind, he’s thinking, “OK, can we break this one?” And I want him to come back and break it next year.

What are you going to do with the pumpkin?

I’m going to donate it to a local brewery up in Fryeburg called Saco River Brewing. I’m 90% sure that this is what we’re going to do with it. The goal is to make the world’s largest pumpkin fermentation vessel. Their owner, Mason Irish, is going to brew beer in it and make a true pumpkin beer.