Second-year Tualatin Pumpkin Regatta participant Alia Martin said she became interested in the city’s unorthodox gardening tradition after reading an article in Tualatin Life.
“You guys had a contest, and you were like, ‘email Tualatin Life and we’ll give you seeds!’” Martin told Tualatin Life. “I held onto these seeds, and I entered the pumpkin regatta lottery, and I won, and I was able to paddle a pumpkin, and I was like, ‘This is the best experience of my entire life.’”
In 2022, Tualatin Life published an article entitled “Tualatin Life’s Pumpkin Contest!” that encouraged readers to email in for giant pumpkin seeds, track and share growth updates, and row them in the Giant Pumpkin Regatta the following year.
The West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta has been a fall staple in Tualatin since 2004. The event features a contest between prize pumpkins carved into watercraft and paddled across the Lake of the Commons by their gardeners.
Martin said that after winning a chance to paddle in a past regatta, she rediscovered her seeds from the Tualatin Life article and, in 2025, paddled across the Lake of the Commons in her own 661-pound pumpkin.
Martin credited other local growers’ hard work for her first foray into the activity and explained that she looked to people like Jim Sherwood and Judy Marshall for advice when growing her first gourd.
“I’ll just take these three ways to do it, and I’ll just compare them, and I’ll just try,” Martin said. “I got in touch with the Pacific Giant Vegetable Growers once my pumpkin started looking like it was gonna be big last year and I was like, ‘I better join this club so I can just fully embrace who I’ve become.’”
Martin is now a bona fide member of the gargantuan gardening group, which also hosts the regatta.
In an effort to top the size of last year’s squash, Martin said that in April, she planted three different pumpkins and threw a cacophony of chemical cocktails and surefire growing practices at the plants to ensure their enormity.
“This season I took a few days off of work and made a whole fertilizer plan,” Martin said.
Martin explained that while she considered managing the upkeep of the pumpkin a “slow burn” compared with rowing in the race, the gardening cycle also had its own pitfalls that could prove detrimental to the buoyancy of her future boat.
“You can push the fertilizer too hard, or it can rain too much and then your pumpkin gets too much water and then it can crack, something bad can just happen,” Martin said. “Paddling a pumpkin was amazing and like this quick hit, like cheap thrill, exciting thing to do, but growing a pumpkin is a slow burn.”
Martin said her largest pumpkin this season weighed about the same as last year’s, but she also said she “measured light” and that the pumpkin could actually clock a heftier weight on the day of.
Martin explained that while the whole event was intimidating, competing in the regatta had taught her that, much like an unnaturally large pumpkin, one can only expand their horizons by growing out of their comfort zones.
“It’s interesting as an adult to try to do something new that you haven’t done before and then be successful,” Martin said. “It’s a really neat group of people…It’s interesting putting yourself into a situation where you might be a little bit uncomfortable, but I feel like when you’re uncomfortable you can grow a little bit.”
The 2026 West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta will kick off at 10 a.m. on Oct. 18 at the Lake of the Commons in Tualatin. Martin will set sail at noon.
