ALLEN CLARK MIGHT describe himself as a backyard gardener, but there’s nothing amateurish about his results. In 2024, he brought a 974-pound pumpkin to the state fair, winning not one but three blue ribbons, including the People’s Choice Award.
“Pumpkins love the sunshine and they love the dry climate we have,” he says, noting the warm springtime temperatures and limited pests.
Clark started cultivating pumpkins just a few years ago, when he grew a nine-pounder in his Albuquerque backyard. That was all it took to get hooked.
He quickly dug into raising competitive pumpkins, but the learning curve was steep. Before last year’s nearly half-ton winner, the largest pumpkin he’d ever grown was 53 pounds. After expanding his garden footprint and refining his methods to manage soil pH and combat squash bugs, his prize pumpkin started to grow as much as 35 pounds per day.
As September approached last year, an unanticipated problem became clear: Clark didn’t know how he was going to get the gigantic pumpkin out of his yard in his Academy Place neighborhood. He eventually located a crane operator who agreed to lift the cucurbit over his house and onto the bed of a truck, which transported it to Expo New Mexico. There, it wowed visitors and judges alike, falling short of the state record by fewer than 50 pounds.
“I really enjoyed standing in the corner of the room and watching people come in and just hit a wall of amazement,” he says. “It was fascinating to watch people have this genuine reaction—thinking it’s fake or like, How could it get that big?”
➤ From giant pumpkins to powwows, discover everything happening across the fair's 236 acres.