Once upon a time I was the pumpkin product manager working with a breeder just before he retired.
He had a long very successfully career. One day he asked me what I thought of the giant pumpkin market. I told him to have fun and if he made a decent one, I would find a market for it.
Thus began the years of several acres of giant pumpkin we evaluated together.
Sadly we never got one that I thought was worth introducing, but we grew some 900lb ones and entered them into the local giant pumpkin competition. The damn things crack and sunburn way too easily.
I still think he had some revolutionary ideas that could have made a nice tidy sum if he could have gotten them reliably holding together.
Wow that’s actually awesome thanks for going to the effort to show us that! I particularly like the Warty Goblin and the Mini Love! Perhaps one day those varietals will be as common and recognised as a Granny Smith and your legacy will live on forever!
How much creative input do you have in the breeding process or is it more on the naming/marketing side? Are there any other dream projects like giant pumpkins that you always wanted to try?
As a breeder, I had limited creative control. I could mess around with around 10% of the effort. Everything else was meeting market specs (boring as fuck actually). Origami and Bacir is from that 10% messing around over some drinks in cooperation with some other breeders. Origami is a cross between a cantaloupe out of Mexico and Italian type. Bacir is a cross between a honeydew and a charentais (the only one that didn’t pop open on the bottom.)
Pumpkins - Nobody knew what the fuck they were doing. The breeder was a classic absent minded professor who was trying everything for fun. He got a ton of cool new genetics from a farmer in Michigan. So I got to play little kid in the pumpkin patch. I had around a 95% success rate on picking the winners at first glance. 100% creative freedom, it’s was a hell of a lot of fun for about 3 weeks of the year…
Watermelons was a slog- the breeder couldn’t give me much to work with due to severe historical underfunding. I was mainly trying to get he the funding she needed and build the program up where it should have been.
If you notice there are no cucumbers. I ran into big issues with a breeder who screwed the pooch big time. He fucked up so badly he got an early retirement and I basically had to restart the entire program with a newly mint PhD with zero experience. Took me a few years to retrain that shiney new PhD from all the stupid shit his doctorate taught him. It takes around 10 years to make a new variety and I had moved on by then.
Really interesting stuff! The mind boggles at the possibilities of interesting fruit. You should consider doing an AMA Its such a niche area I’m sure other people would be interested too!
For a more niche, but possibly more lucrative option once the cracking problems were fixed, figure out how to preserve them properly, mount one on a carriage frame and rent it out to people crazy about Disney for Cinderella themed parties. I have seen the intensity of the Disney obsessed, they would drop $$$$$$ for something like that.
Once upon a time I was the pumpkin product manager working with a breeder just before he retired.
He had a long very successfully career. One day he asked me what I thought of the giant pumpkin market. I told him to have fun and if he made a decent one, I would find a market for it.
Thus began the years of several acres of giant pumpkin we evaluated together.
Sadly we never got one that I thought was worth introducing, but we grew some 900lb ones and entered them into the local giant pumpkin competition. The damn things crack and sunburn way too easily.
I still think he had some revolutionary ideas that could have made a nice tidy sum if he could have gotten them reliably holding together.
This whole story felt like an elaborate set-up for a joke, what the fuck?
Yours is one of the more unusual job titles I’ve ever heard! Have you ever been involved with other interesting products?
By the way I think your instinct was right, giant pumpkins would be a hit with hardcore Halloween decorators
Well… There was a few… Below are a selection of the ones I named.
https://www.harrisseeds.com/products/11613-pumpkin-warty-goblin-f1?variant=52367787917675
https://www.seedway.com/product/mischief-pumpkin-farmore/
https://us.stokeseeds.com/hybridpumpkin-cronus-0780209t.html
https://www.harrisseeds.com/products/11724-pumpkin-rhea-f1
https://us.stokeseeds.com/hybridpumpkin-littlegiant-0780226t.html
https://gtiwholesale.com/products/watermelon-wayfarer
Those are my stunningly beautiful hands.
https://www.sekluva.lt/en/product/watermelon-livia-f1/
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetables/watermelons/diploid-watermelons/mini-love-f1-watermelon-seed-3457.html
https://www.seedway.com/product/troubadour-watermelon-primed/
They photoshopped the hell out that picture… Those fuckers. I have the original somewhere on my files.
These cantaloupes/melons I worked on as a plant breeder but other people picked out the shitty names.
https://www.melissas.com/products/origami-melons
https://www.francesconmelons.com/en/products/1026/smooth-melon
There’s a bunch more but I’d have to pull up my old files to remember them all.
This was all before moved into row crops, native grasses etc… The best job title is the one I have now…“Owner”.
Wow that’s actually awesome thanks for going to the effort to show us that! I particularly like the Warty Goblin and the Mini Love! Perhaps one day those varietals will be as common and recognised as a Granny Smith and your legacy will live on forever!
How much creative input do you have in the breeding process or is it more on the naming/marketing side? Are there any other dream projects like giant pumpkins that you always wanted to try?
As a breeder, I had limited creative control. I could mess around with around 10% of the effort. Everything else was meeting market specs (boring as fuck actually). Origami and Bacir is from that 10% messing around over some drinks in cooperation with some other breeders. Origami is a cross between a cantaloupe out of Mexico and Italian type. Bacir is a cross between a honeydew and a charentais (the only one that didn’t pop open on the bottom.)
Pumpkins - Nobody knew what the fuck they were doing. The breeder was a classic absent minded professor who was trying everything for fun. He got a ton of cool new genetics from a farmer in Michigan. So I got to play little kid in the pumpkin patch. I had around a 95% success rate on picking the winners at first glance. 100% creative freedom, it’s was a hell of a lot of fun for about 3 weeks of the year…
Watermelons was a slog- the breeder couldn’t give me much to work with due to severe historical underfunding. I was mainly trying to get he the funding she needed and build the program up where it should have been.
If you notice there are no cucumbers. I ran into big issues with a breeder who screwed the pooch big time. He fucked up so badly he got an early retirement and I basically had to restart the entire program with a newly mint PhD with zero experience. Took me a few years to retrain that shiney new PhD from all the stupid shit his doctorate taught him. It takes around 10 years to make a new variety and I had moved on by then.
Really interesting stuff! The mind boggles at the possibilities of interesting fruit. You should consider doing an AMA Its such a niche area I’m sure other people would be interested too!
For a more niche, but possibly more lucrative option once the cracking problems were fixed, figure out how to preserve them properly, mount one on a carriage frame and rent it out to people crazy about Disney for Cinderella themed parties. I have seen the intensity of the Disney obsessed, they would drop $$$$$$ for something like that.