An unusual, huge vegetable has star power at the Farmington Fair.
FARMINGTON – Student teacher Laurie Crummett Tranten asks schoolchildren at SAD 9 how many pickles they think she’ll get from her 317-pound green “cukin.”
A cukin is the product of cross-pollinating a giant Atlantic pumpkin and pickling cucumbers.
The monstrous, round vegetable is getting a lot of attention at the Farmington Fair, especially as it sits next to a 387-pound giant Atlantic pumpkin raised by Tranten’s roommate, Cheryl Fisher.
The women cleared a plot of land outside their apartment on Main Street in Farmington this spring for a garden. They brought in some manure from Sue and Rupert Pratt’s River Run Farm in Strong, then planted giant Atlantic pumpkin seeds and squeezed three cucumber pickling plants in some space in the middle of the pumpkin patch, Tranten said.
They wanted to grow giant pumpkins and small cucumbers.
What they got was some giant pumpkins – they’re not as big as they had hoped – and a couple of giant cucumbers shaped like pumpkins.
Tranten said she fed the plants with Miracle-Gro, and what she thought was a pumpkin grew and grew and grew.
The smaller cukin was harvested early so larger cukin could continue to grow.
Tranten’s 16-year-old son, Nick Tranten, of Kingfield, named the pumpkin-cucumber product a cukin.
They cut off a piece of the smaller cukin, and it smelled like a cucumber and had the same texture, Laurie Tranten said. When they tasted it, “It was the sweetest tasting cucumber,” she said.
The pumpkins were supposed to grow to 770 pounds, but Tranten said Fisher told her that to grow a large pumpkin, the soil needs to have a pH level of 6. Their soil had a level of only 3, she said.
“Imagine what we could have gotten if our soil had a pH level of 6,” she said.
Already 18 people have signed up to get free seeds from the cukin once they cut it open and dry them.
Tranten has written “The Tale of the Cukin: A Cross-pollination Story” and put it on the wall near the pumpkin display in the Exhibition Hall along with pictures of the cukin as it was growing.
Tranten, who after she finishes her student teaching will become a teacher, tells schoolchildren she plans to make 317 pounds of cukin pickles.
But really, she said, she’ll probably just make it a green jack-o’-lantern.
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