It’s the great pumpkin.
A Montana man easily smashed the state record for the heaviest pumpkin with a hulking gourd he entered into a competition that weighed more than the average American bison.
Joe Nigro, an insurance salesman who moonlights as an apparent harvester extraordinaire, spent five years working on his green thumb until he grew the monster squash.
Nigro’s 1,591-pound gourd won the title of heaviest pumpkin grown in Montana at an agricultural competition one state over on Saturday, according to KRTV.
The previous record of 1,348 pounds was handily defeated by Nigro’s prized pumpkin that he said grew “like 10 pounds a day.” The record was set in 2023, and that same year, Nigro’s own pumpkin was just four pounds shy of the coveted title.
The salesman was inspired to take up cultivating pumpkins after his friends on the East Coast sent him a pack of seeds a few years ago. From there, he started growing patches annually and entering competitions across surrounding states.
“The first year, 2021, I grew a 950-pound pumpkin, and then I just been chasing that dragon pretty much ever since, just trying to get something bigger,” Nigro told KRTV.
Nigro’s girlfriend, Sidney Sipe, told the outlet that his hobby quickly took over their lives as the ever-growing pumpkins required daily maintenance on top of months of meticulous preparations.
“We grew this giant pumpkin, and we were like, ‘Wait a minute, if we could do that with almost no preparation, then what can we do with a little bit more?’ It definitely becomes like his baby, our babies, and when it’s gone, it’s a little sad, but also cool,” Sipe told the outlet.
They’d even grown a second pumpkin as a backup, which weighed in at 1,247 pounds during a competition in South Dakota.
Nigro was awarded a crisp $600 along with the largest-in-state title, and said his winning pumpkin will be sent out to pasture after months of labor.
“I’m going to cut a hole in it and take the seeds and dissect it and look at it, and then smash it probably,” Nigro told the outlet.
The world record for the largest gourd is held by a man in California, renowned for the massive pumpkins he produces annually. Last year, he came just 300 pounds short of shattering his own record of 2,749 pounds, set in 2023.
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