Kids rise to giant pumpkin challege
The Barnyard nurturing students and pumpkins
As well as nurturing local children, in recent years The Barnyard Early Childhood Education Centre in Te Awamutu has held a Giant Pumpkin Challenge.
The competition started four years ago and teacher/organiser Debbie Tucker says that each year the event, and the pumpkins, get bigger and better.
The awards ceremony was held on Saturday morning at The Barnyard with a barbecue and plenty of parental support.
This year’s heaviest pumpkin was a whopping 64kg — apparently, the secret is in how much water you give them.
“It starts in October. We had the seeds. The children planted the seeds and named them. Once they’re about 10cm, we get parents to put their name down if they want to take one home to grow,” Tucker says.
“It’s just grown every year. We have parents who are quite competitive and are very secret squirrel about the size of their pumpkins.”
Forty-five seeds were handed out in October with about 30 pumpkins appearing for Saturday’s ceremony.
Children involved who had started primary school since October were also invited to showcase their giant orange vegetables.
There were prizes across five categories — plus teachers — for the heaviest giant pumpkin, the most
orange, the one with the most character, the best decorated and the best carved.
“Even if you don’t grow one, you can buy a supermarket one and carve or decorate it. This year we included the teachers, they got their own category,” Tucker says.
“The biggest teacher’s pumpkin was 55kg. I got pipped in the teacher category by 5kg and I’ve already got my plan in place for next year.
“We had one little girl who decorated her pumpkin and it was all about the Barnyard. It had all the teachers. She’d written all their names on it. It’s
really lovely for us as teachers to get that back as well.”
This great community event has had support from Mitre 10 Mega Te Awamutu since the beginning.
Garden centre manager Lachlan Chambers has been a judge and provided many prizes for the children and teachers.
“We’ve developed quite an awesome relationship with Lachlan,” Tucker says.
“He comes down and judges our pumpkins for us. He also supplies gardening-related prizes for the categories. That’s been awesome. He
loves it and he’s so good.”
The Barnyard owner Michelle Smith and her team are proud that their event is sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Once the ceremony was over, the pumpkins were loaded on to a trailer to be fed to Tucker’s cows.
“The seeds that we used this year came out of the heaviest pumpkin from last year. We put a big tarp down and the children got to smash the pumpkin.
“The seeds get dried off for next year, I take all the pumpkin bits and all the mush goes into our worm
farm,” she says.
The Barnyard Early Childhood Education Centre crew would like to extend a special thank you to Chambers and Mitre 10 Mega. They look forward to his involvement again next year.