World’s largest pumpkin as heavy as 14 wild boars

One Vauxhall Corsa. 14 wild boars. 307 first-year physics textbooks, and 1,535 copies of The Boar. That isn’t the Editor-in-Chief’s slightly perplexing shopping list but is instead a list of items equal in weight to the world’s largest pumpkin.

The titanic vegetable was crowned on 14 October at the annual World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in California. Grown by teacher Travis Gienger, the real-life Great Pumpkin weighs in at a monstrous 1,121kg.

Gienger credits the creation of his gigantic jack-o’-lantern to simple healthy soil and nutritious plant food

The gargantuan gourd is Gienger’s third consecutive win in the contest, and fourth win overall. It wasn’t enough to break the world record, however, set by his previous entry last year which weighed 126kg more.

Gienger credits the creation of his gigantic jack-o’-lantern, rather modestly, to simple healthy soil and nutritious plant-food. Transporting the super-sized squash from its home patch in Anoka, Minnesota was a Herculean 35-hour drive to the contest’s location at Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco.

The work has paid off for Gienger, though, who will now enjoy prizes including a cash pot of $9 per pound of pumpkin, two nights at The Ritz-Carlton, a ’Pumpkin King Champion Ring’, and a custom-made Champion’s Jacket. His pumpkin, named Rudy, will take pride of place at a Halloween exhibition in southern California later this month after a team of experts have carved it into the mother-of-all jack-o’-lanterns.

The possibility of even growing such colossal pumpkins is down to the biology of the vegetable, which grows with a naturally thick and wood-like skin. Where other plants like grapes or tomatoes would eventually split from the sheer weight of the water inside, pumpkins can stay intact.

The girthy gourds are further aided by their remarkably long growing cycle, which can last over 100 days, as well as the fact that they grow on the ground, eliminating the risk of snapping off the vine early.

I don’t really see any slowdown in how big these pumpkins are getting

– Andy Wolf, pumpkin grower

All this has meant the growth of truly prodigious pumpkins, which seem set to only grow with every passing year as farmers exchange seeds from the greatest pumpkins of years past. The genetic lineages are closely-tracked to ensure success – some pumpkins have ancestries tracing back to the 1980s.

The possibilities seem endless. Speaking to Popular Science, Andy Wolf, another giant pumpkin grower, said: “I don’t really see any slowdown in how big these pumpkins are getting.

“I hope there isn’t a limit to it. I hope it just keeps going.”