Ten 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 2 new enormous pumpkins with a collective weight of 2,122 pounds! These aren’t your average pumpkins, they’re humongous. This year’s pumpkin is over 500 pounds heavier than last year’s which weighed in at 950 pounds. This year’s giant gourds are sourced from a local New England Farm owned by Art Kazenski of Irving, Massachusetts, and generously donated by Boston Public Market vendor Red Apple Farm of Phillipston, Massachusetts, recently ranked among the best in the country for apple picking! The largest pumpkin weighs 1,500 pounds and the accompanying squash weighs 622 pounds.
The pumpkins usually debut in a duo deemed the “PumpKing” and “PumpQueen.” 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 pumpkins are an addition to the Boston Public Market’s seventh annual Harvest Festival which takes place on Thursday, October 17 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. Tickets for the harvest bash are $60 per person.
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 15, always on display at the Boston Public Market!
Catch the official forklift arrival ceremony on Tuesday, October 15 at 11:30 AM
100 Hanover St, Boston, MA 02108