Right now I’m reading a fun book about a year in the life of competitive pumpkin growers in Rhode Island called Backyard Giants. There is a community of giant-pumpkin growers all over the country and in Canada. They compete every year at official giant pumpkin contests to break the world record for the heaviest pumpkin. Last weekend at a weigh-off in Massachusetts, a Rhode Island man shattered the 2006 world record by 187 pounds with his pumpkin that tipped the scales at 1689 pounds!
This morning I was excited to find out that there was a pumpkin weigh-off today just north of Madison. I wanted to see one for myself, so I called a friend and we drove 2 hours to the 10th Annual Nekoosa Giant Pumpkin Fest. Pumpkins weren’t the only giant vegetables there. There was a beet the size of a basketball, watermelons that wouldn’t fit in ANYONE’S refrigerator and carrots bigger than my arm.
The festival also features a pumpkin carving contest, a pumpkin regetta (yes, you paddle in hollowed-out pumpkins), a pumpkin bake-off, and we didn’t stay for this one, but late this afternoon they dropped a 1,000-pound pumpkin from a crane so the crowd could watch it explode. The announcer said that deer would spend the next two nights eating the remnants.
We watched some of the weigh-off but they started with the “smaller” pumpkins which ranged in weight from 500 to 800 pounds. Some of them were grown by kids. The announcer said that the huge pumpkins in the middle of the grandstand area easily weighed over 1000 pounds and they certainly hoped that someone might break the world record!
Update: The winning pumpkin at this year’s Nekoosa Giant Pumpkin Fest weighed 1362 pounds, not a world record but certainly impressive!