Good gourd! Teacher breaks national record with pumpkin weighing 2,560 pounds
HALF MOON BAY, Calif. – A massive pumpkin shattered the United States record for heaviest pumpkin, weighing in at a whopping 2,560 pounds.
The pumpkin, grown by horticulture teacher Travis Gienger, won the annual pumpkin-weighing contest at the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival in Northern California on Monday, The Associated Press reported.
Photos from the event show the massive gourd, which was lifted onto a scale with a forklift.
“I always tell people back home, this is like the Super Bowl of pumpkins,” Gienger told KGO, before learning he had won the contest.
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Gienger had to drive the pumpkin for 35 hours from his Anoka, Minnesota, home in order to enter the contest, the AP reported.
“You think driving in a snowstorm is bad? Try driving one of these things,” Gienger said.
Gienger has a history of growing massive squash. He won the same contest in Northern California in 2020 with a pumpkin weighing 2,350 pounds, KGO reported.
Oh my gourd: 2,554 pound pumpkin sets national record
“This size, I’ve been hitting it with fertilizer 14 times a day, watering quite a bit, but I had a really big plant too,” Gienger told KGO. “Most people don’t understand this was, like, a 2,000 square foot plant that was just a monster.”
The pumpkin breaks the record set Oct. 1 by Scott Andrusz, which also set a New York state record at 2,554 pounds.
The honor of the world’s heaviest pumpkin belongs to Stefano Cutrupi in Italy, who grew a pumpkin weighing 2,702 pounds in 2021, according to Guinness World Records.
