MISQUAH — The county fair is still a month off, but its season has quietly begun: the entry books are out at the Co-op and the library, entries close August 1, and the two families who have turned the giant-pumpkin competition into the fair’s defining rivalry report, in the careful non-language of growers who give nothing away, that their entries are “coming along nicely” — which, longtime fairgoers know, means war.

The fair, held the second week of August at the fairgrounds in Pinedale, is the season’s culminating event, and Misquah sends its full complement of entries — pies and quilts and preserves, the 4-H animals, the photography, and, above all, the vegetables, in which category the giant pumpkin reigns as the fair’s most-watched and least-friendly contest.

The rivalry between the Bjornstad and Aakre families is now in its second decade and has acquired the settled bitterness of a thing nobody can remember starting. Each summer the two households nurse their enormous gourds in guarded backyards, decline to discuss weights, accuse one another genially of espionage, and arrive at the fair in August fully prepared to be devastated. “It’s friendly,” insisted one Bjornstad, in a tone that was not friendly. “We’re neighbors. We’re friends. I just intend to beat them, is all. And they intend the same. And one of us will, and the other will say the scale was off, same as every year.”

For the record, and because both households will be consulting it: last August’s title went to the Aakres at 611 pounds, nine pounds and one formal appeal ahead of the Bjornstad entry — the appeal contending the scale “read heavy for some people,” a theory the fair board heard respectfully and declined. The scale has since been recertified, at the board’s expense and, Tho noted, “at everybody’s request, which tells you something.” Entry in the open class costs two dollars; the giant-pumpkin weigh-in is the fair’s final Saturday at ten o’clock — bring your own tarp and, historically, your own grievance.

Fair-board chair Verna Tho confirmed the dates and the deadline and gently reminded the community that the fair contains “a great many categories besides the pumpkins, all of which deserve entries, and several of which are actually judged on merit.” Entry forms are available now; the pumpkins, both families confirm, will be ready — weather, and sabotage, permitting.