IThere is a French Pumpkin Championship. Or rather, growers of giant pumpkins. The Benzema of the specialty is called Mehdi Daho. Aged 44, this market gardener from Spay (Sarthe) won his tenth national title on October 2 in La Roche-sur-Yon (Vendée), presenting a gourd of 928 kg – the weight of a bison or a Twingo. Endowed with a beautiful orange color, the maousse squash, edible, is currently on display at the Papéa amusement park, in Le Mans, until November 6, on the occasion of Halloween. One would almost come to regret that it had not been emptied and filled with candles.
Mehdi Daho is an XXL pumpkin activist. In 2021, another of her babies had reached 984kg – her personal best. Never had such a heavy vegetable been grown on French soil. Sixteen other vegetable garden records, past or in progress, are to the credit of the forecastle. A 4.7 kg onion, bigger than a bowling ball, a carrot the size of an alligator (3.39 m), a beet as high as a building floor (4 m) or a pepper of 621 grams, which earned him a citation at Guinness Book of Records, have emerged from his extraordinary garden in recent years. Corn (6.56 m), celery (16 kg), melon (18.25 kg), watermelon (63.35 kg), parsnip (2.47 m), leek (4.4 m)… No variety resists his pushing technique “100% organic”, he assures. “I don’t use fertilizers or pesticides. » A lot of elbow grease, however.
“Seeing your pumpkin take on 25 kg a day at the height of its growth is an incomparable pleasure”
Fed with organic products (compost, guano, seaweed, liquid manure, etc.), raised in a greenhouse in a micro-climate recreated using polystyrene boxes and fans, his competition animals are, at the base, seeds genetically selected. Gathered within an international federation, the faded giant pumpkins (“giant pumpkins”) perfect them at will and exchange them for a common purpose : “Pushing back the limits of nature”, explain the 41e world “pumpkin tree” – a rank to which his 2021 record propelled him. Seeding is not enough, however. All the art consists in guiding the stems without them breaking, weeding manually in the middle of a forest of peduncles, maintaining the PH of the seedling… “Seeing your pumpkin take on 25 kg a day at the height of its growth is an incomparable pleasure, and proof that you have worked hard”continues the market gardener, who arrived late in the profession.
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