Great Pumpkins

“The growth of these monsters is phenomenal.”

Jim Bryson, Grower of world’s largest pumpkin

Photo by David R. Tribble

Happy Halloween to all! Big pumpkins and lots o’ pumpkins are big stuff in small towns. Read on . . .

•  The largest pumpkin in the world, weighing in at 1,818.5 pounds, hails from the small town of Ormstown, Quebec, Canada (population 3,651). The pumpkin is the toast of the town in New York City this week. A master pumpkin carver (yes, there are master pumpkin carvers) has turned the behemoth gourd into a frightening zombie (see the photo at left).
For more pictures of the zombie pumpkin & a video of the pumpkin carver at work, see → Halloween: World’s largest pumpkin carving

Read the article → Quebec farm grows world’s largest pumpkin

•  The largest pumpkin in Connecticut, grown in Broad Brook (population 3,532), weighs in at 1,487.5 pounds. Maybe not a world record breaker, but huge. What makes this pumpkin extra special is that it grew in only two and a half months, and its grower captured the whole thing on film. He set up a camera to photograph the pumpkin every 15 minutes for the entire two and a half months and then combined the photos into a minute and a half time-lapse video. Check it out:

 •  Folks in Highwood, Illinois (population 4,490) figured if they couldn’t grow the world’s biggest pumpkin they’d gather together the world’s largest number of carved pumpkins in one place. Townspeople carved 30,900 pumpkins—nearly 7 pumpkins for every man, woman, and child in town—topping the old record of 30,128 pumpkins. The pumpkins were stacked on scaffolding that lined four of the town’s five downtown blocks, and when the fun is done the pumpkins will be trucked to northern Illinois and fed to the pigs. Talk about hog heaven.

Read the article → Carving out a record

•  For more pumpkin fun, check out Google’s homepage today and its 1,000-pound pumpkins.