Eight years ago, Boston decided to celebrate the fall season by bringing in an extravagantly large pumpkin for pedestrians to awe at. But this year, the city welcomed not one, but three pumpkins to the Boston Public Market! The pumpkins arrived on October 11 and were trekked out by heavy-duty trucks and forklifts from neighboring towns. These aren’t your average pumpkins, they’re humongous.
The largest pumpkin comes in at 1,772 pounds from Art Kazenski of Erving, Massachusetts. The midsize pumpkin is shy of 1,300 pounds and the smallest came in at 773 pounds. The pumpkins are a donation to the market courtesy of the Boston Public Market’s apple cider donut vendor, Red Apple Farm.
The pumpkins usually debut in a duo deemed the “PumpKing” and “PumpQueen,” but this year they also have a PumpLing. While these pumpkins did not win the record for the world’s heaviest pumpkin, they came pretty darn close. The world’s heaviest pumpkin to date weighed 2,625 pounds from Ludwigsburg, Germany in 2016. Before this pumpkin broke the record, most “world’s heaviest” pumpkin awardees were closer to 1,800 pounds, similar to the largest pumpkin in the bunch.
The midsize “pumpkin” does qualify as a squash. Under the squash category, it takes home the title of the world’s heaviest squash at 1,300 pounds.
The pumpkins are an addition to the Boston Public Market’s fifth annual Harvest Festival which took place in early October as an initiative to raise funds for the Community Engagement Fund, a fund that supports the education and engagement of students and entrepreneurs involved with the public market.
While the party might be over, the pumpkins aren’t going anywhere. After all, it took a village to get them there. John Rose of Red Apple farm, who assisted with transplanting the pumpkins from farms across New England, says they plan to keep the pumpkins there until they begin to rot, which should be sometime in November.
Once they show signs of decay, they are smashed open, and the seeds get carved out for planting in hopes that this will grow another gigantic pumpkin for the following year. You can check out this year’s pumpkins, always on display outside the Boston Public Market!
100 Hanover St, Boston, MA 02108