World Record Pumpkin Grown in Rhode Island this Fall!
Giant pumpkins are not a normal thing to grow. It takes an intelligent plan to grow a pumpkin the size of a car, and that is exactly what Ron Wallace of Coventry, Rhode Island accomplished. His pumpkin weighed 3,156 pounds! That is roughly the mass, size, and density of a 1998 Honda Civic!
How do they know how much it weighed, you may wonder? Well, Ron hauled his homegrown pumpkin onto an industrial scale at Freichs Farm in Warren, Rhode Island. This whopping size and weight would be comparative to an above-average Atlantic walrus.
This is the first pumpkin to breach the 3000-pound mark. A British grower named Ian Paton had grown at 2857-pound pumpkin this fall and thought that that was the record. But a few weeks later, Ron’s pumpkin smashed Ian’s record.
There is actually a Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, that although it sounds fictitious, it is very real. They have agents who inspect the pumpkins and make sure that the entries are legitimate.
Structural soundness is very important because you can imagine that if a pumpkin explodes, that hundreds of gallons of water and pumpkin guts would be quite a mess to clean up!
Ron Wallace is not new to growing pumpkins. Back in 2006, he was the first guy to cross 1500 pounds for his pumpkin. And then in 2012, he became the first grower to top 2600 lbs. And now he cracked 3000 lbs.!
Ron stated that this was his first year growing a pumpkin inside a greenhouse. He applied a scientific approach. A pumpkin of that size can gain sixty pounds per day!
Some people may ask, “why?” If you know knowledge about this type of pumpkin, you’ll know that they are not good for eating. They are stringy and watery and do not taste very good. But let’s say that it could be made into pumpkin pies…. It’s estimated that it would make roughly 1400 pies!
Unfortunately, breaking the 3000 lb. barrier has taken a toll. Ron is tired. He said that he may take next year off to “finish projects around the farm.”