Land of the Giants
Spice Girl
This year Alex grew several giant pumpkins, but one in particular “Spice Girl”, was very large and was a beautiful orange colour. Usually giant pumpkins don’t have a nice orange colour they usually are a weird pale orange to white. With a lot of convincing, Alex decided to take his pumpkin to Pumpkinfest in Port Elgin. Pumpkinfest is one of the official giant pumpkin weigh off sites and has had some world record pumpkins weighed in. Currently the world record for a giant pumpkin is 1810.5 lbs. Even though we knew we would not win the big prize, we decided we should show off our beautiful giant.
Harvesting the giant pumpkin was an exciting and nerve racking ordeal. Obviously the pumpkin was way too heavy for us to lift, so we had to get creative. We ended up laying large straps underneath the pumpkin and using the front-end loader to carefully lift the pumpkin. 
This was a balancing act to make sure the pumpkin was suspended evenly as we lifted it. Then we placed a skid underneath the pumpkin, and then Alex tried to lift it a little higher and the pumpkin slipped out of the straps and crashed onto the skid. We were nervous that this would have cracked the pumpkin (an automatic disqualification) but we could not see any cracks. We loaded the pumpkin onto the truck and headed down to Port Elgin.
It was an exciting drive to Port Elgin with a giant pumpkin on the back of the truck. It is not everyday people see that huge of a pumpkin. Many people gave us the thumbs up, a lot of second looks and many people were pulling their cameras out to get pictures as we drove by.
The offical weight
Sunday was the day of reckoning for all the hard work we had put into the pumpkin. When we arrived, many people right away were asking what the genetics of the pumpkin were, because it was such a nice looking pumpkin. Then it came time for the weigh-in and inspection of the pumpkin. We past the inspection No Cracks!!! So off to the scale, the pumpkin weighed in at 613.2 lbs. Heavy but not the heaviest, putting Al in 5th place at the time, however there were more to come. Overall Al finished in 10th, with the largest of the pumpkins being 1376.6 lbs, looks like we have a lot of growing to do next year in order to win. The pumpkin is on display in the market if you would like to come in and see it for yourself.