Nine years ago, Boston decided to celebrate the fall season by bringing in an extravagantly large pumpkin for pedestrians to awe at. Last year, the city welcomed not one, but three pumpkins to the Boston Public Market! The pumpkins were trekked out by heavy-duty trucks and forklifts from neighboring towns.
The tradition continues with 3 new enormous pumpkins! These aren’t your average pumpkins, they’re humongous. The heaviest of the Giant Royal Pumpkins of 2023 weighs 950 pounds!
Last, year the largest pumpkin came in at 1,772 pounds from Art Kazenski of Erving, Massachusetts. The midsize pumpkin was 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,” any additional family members are PumpLings. While last year’s 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” did qualify as a squash. Under the squash category, it took home the title of the world’s heaviest squash at 1,300 pounds.
The pumpkins are an addition to the Boston Public Market’s sixth annual Harvest Festival which took place on Thursday, October 12,2023 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.
Even after the party, the pumpkins aren’t going anywhere. After all, it takes a village to get them there. They plan to keep the pumpkins there until they begin to rot, which should be sometime in late 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 beginning October 10, always on display outside the Boston Public Market!
100 Hanover St, Boston, MA 02108