Giant veggies befitting of a giant state

PALMER, Alaska -- John Evans is one serious gardener.

Five years ago he moved to Alaska dreaming of what big things he and 20 hours of daily sun could create in a half-acre garden.

Evans lives to cultivate vegetables of unusual size. Like a 71-pound Swiss chard, a 45-pound red cabbage and a 35-bunch of broccoli, all world records.

"It's always been a bit of an obsession," he said.

Plenty of Alaskans share his passion in a land where summer is brief but intense, as a visitor to the Alaska State Fair soon learns. Walking around the fair's veggie display is like cruising a roadside farm stand, except that the produce looks like it was grown on steroids.

There are stalks of rhubarb like vaulting poles, broccoli tall and broad enough to shade a family picnic, and beets bigger than basketballs.

Alaska's competitive gardeners harvest their crops mostly for fun, though there is some profit out there for those growing the unofficial state vegetable -- green cabbage.

Since 1941, the cabbage showdown -- based strictly on size -- has been held annually in August at the state fair in Palmer, a town 40 miles north of Anchorage that was founded some 60 years ago as a New Deal agriculture project.

The first winning cabbage weighed in at 23 pounds. The current record is 98 pounds, set in 1990 by Lesley Dinkel, a member of the family that has dominated the contest for years. The world record stands at 124 pounds.

In past years, the biggest Alaska cabbages earned $50 and momentary statewide fame for its grower. This year things got more interesting when the purse was boosted to $4,000. Half went to the winner, who was, of course, a Dinkel.

Gene S. Dinkel grabbed the big prize with a sprawling leafy head that tipped the scales at 90 pounds. Second place, worth $1,000, went to his uncle, Gene A. Dinkel, at 82 pounds.

The megacabbage exhibit was one of the fair's biggest attractions. After waiting in a long queue, devotees gaped and grabbed snapshots of the entrants.

"That's a lot of coleslaw," said one.

Just what it takes to grow a monumental cabbage is open to debate.

Gene A. Dinkel, patriarch of the clan and a frequent winner, insists it's not much more than digging a hole in the ground, throwing in some seeds and letting the sun do its thing. So far as care and feeding goes, he offers up little but the most basic guidance.

"While they're growing, you don't touch them," he said. "If you squeeze them, you break the ribs and they split." Split cabbages are ineligible for the fair.

Dinkel said members of his family are gardening hobbyists, while Evans -- who holds 20 Alaska size records but shuns cabbage as being too popular -- approaches the field as a self-proclaimed "nutty professor." He does extensive botanical research and experimentation and mentions such concepts as biocatalysts and hormone treatments.

Rocco Moschetti, a federal farm agent in Palmer, said vegetables in Alaska are in general slightly bigger than produce in the Lower 48 because of the longer summer days. But not all vegetables are monster size.

The competitive gardeners have their techniques, Moschetti said. They use special seeds, start their plants indoors during the early spring, and feed and fertilize them intensely.

It's also necessary to protect their giant vegetables.

"Lots of people have lost their prize cabbages to moose that find their way into the yard to have a meal," he said.

A few weeks ago Evans held an open house at his garden in Palmer, and the tourists thronged.

"It was like a rock concert," he said. "The ladies were screaming when they saw the giant vegetables still on the vine."