Growing the Big One

Emma Silver is a successful city girl hosting 'Seattle Pulse' in Seattle. After a corporate merger and the death of her grandfather Walt, she travels to Valleyville for the funeral. There, she discovers Walt left her his farm, which is $75,000 in debt and facing foreclosure by the ambitious Mayor and banker Kyle Finster. Simultaneously, Emma's radio show is taken over by a younger host, and she is reassigned to 'Green is the New Black,' a gardening show. Her manager, Kate, decides to broadcast the show from the farm via webcams, turning Emma's life into a reality-style program. Emma decides to enter the local giant pumpkin contest, which offers a $50,000 prize for breaking the world record. She meets her neighbor Seth Cullen, a mechanic who she initially threatens with mace. Seth is revealed to be a Stanford-educated engineer who left a high-stress life in L.A. for the honesty of rural life. After Emma wins a poker game against him, Seth becomes her partner in the pumpkin patch. The town is filled with pumpkin-obsessed characters, including the 'Pumpkin Widow Support Group'—women whose husbands ignore them for their gourds. Emma struggles to decipher Walt’s 'pumpkin Bible,' which is written in cryptic poetry. She eventually realizes the poems are codes for care instructions, such as singing 'Yankee Doodle' to the plants and using an 'extreme nutrient machine' to pump raw manure. The rivalry with Mayor Finster escalates during a 'stealth run' (espionage) on his patch, which ends with Emma and Seth being sprayed by a skunk and briefly jailed. As the pumpkins grow to massive sizes, Emma is offered a dream job as a morning co-anchor in New York City. At the final weigh-in, Emma and Seth’s pumpkin weighs 1,880 pounds, breaking the world record and securing the prize money. Emma initially prepares to leave for New York with the corporate executives but realizes she has found a real community. She rejects the 'Big Apple' for the 'Big Pumpkin,' returns to Valleyville, and Seth proposes to her during a live broadcast using a pumpkin seed instead of a ring.