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Giant pumpkin
Earlier this month, a man in England broke his own world record after growing the heaviest pumpkin in recorded history. However, it would appear he’s lost the crown to a guy from Rhode Island who became the first person to surpass the 3,000-pound mark with his gargantuan gourd.
The start of fall also marks the arrival of Pumpkin Season. That particular form of squash doesn’t get much love outside of autumn, but they take center stage as a staple of Halloween displays and weekend excursions to patches filled with people wearing flannel.
The typical pumpkin is small enough to carry on your own, but that is not the case with the giant pumpkins at the center of competitions that give growers the chance to flex their horticultural expertise and show off the literal fruits of their labor in their quest to grow the heaviest one they possibly can.
Those showdowns can be traced back to the 19th century, and a contest at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago is widely credited with ushering in a new era of competitive pumpkin growing.  William Warnock set what was then a world record with a pumpkin that tipped the scales at 365 pounds, and the bar has repeatedly been raised since then.
Prior to this year, no one had managed to grow a pumpkin that surpassed the 3,000-pound mark, but that is no longer the case.
A pumpkin-growing legend from Rhode Island set a new world record with one that weighed in at 3,156 lbs.
Last week, a British man named Ian Paton secured a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records with a pumpkin that officially weighed 2,856.8 pounds (surpassing the mark of 2,819 pounds that he and his brother had set the previous year).
According to WPRI, it does not appear he’ll be holding onto the title for very long, as people who attended the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Warren, Rhode Island on Saturday, October 10th, got to witness a historic moment courtesy of Ron Wallace.
In 2012, Wallace set a world record after becoming the first person to grow a pumpkin that weighed more than a ton, and he more than managed to outdo himself when he hauled one to Freichs Farm that put the rest of the competition to shame with a recorded weight of 3,156 pounds.
Wallace saw and raised Paton by just over 300 pounds, and in doing so, he became the first person to grow a pumpkin heavier than 3,000 pounds.
His achievement has not been officially certified by the folks at the Guinness Book of World Records, but pending some sort of pumpkin-growing scandal, it would appear he’ll be ascending to the throne in the near future.