Scientists Say There’s No Limit For How Big Pumpkins Can Get

You know what’s spooky? The sky is the limit for how big a pumpkin can grow.

Farmers and scientists have deduced that the world’s largest pumpkins are still ahead of us, even as a 2,471-pound pumpkin just won The Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Weigh-Off in California. And that’s not even the largest pumpkin on record: a gourd once reached 2,907 pounds.

To put it into perspective, that’s over 20 times bigger than what the largest species of squash (Curcubita maxima) grows to in the wild. And that big wild squash is already 10 times heavier than your typical Halloween pumpkin. In many cases, these prize-winning pumpkins require at least an inch of water a week, which allows them to grow up to 70 pounds in a single day.

Defending champion Travis Gienger won top prize at the 52nd annual Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival in Half Moon Bay, California, on October 19.

So how did we get to here? According to The Atlantic, the winner of the first competition in Half Moon Bay, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. Thirty years later, in 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. As journalist Yasmin Tayag found when interviewing Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, more 2,000-pound pumpkins have been grown in the past year than ever before. And scientists and farmers don’t even know how big they can get.

All this expansive pumpkin growth can be likened to how much we enjoy pushing the limits of nature via biohacking and genetic experiments. And if growing a huge gourd comes with a $30,000 prize and the glory of having a world record-breaking pumpkin? All the better.

A pumpkin grown in the town of Kasterlee, Belgium, that competed in pumpkin championships in October 2021.

The origin of essentially all of these prize-winning pumpkins can be traced all the way back to one variety of pumpkin: Dill’s Atlantic Giant. In the world of competitive growers, where seeds are traded and auctioned, single Dill’s Atlantic Giant seeds can be sold for hundreds (and even thousands) of dollars. This is largely due to decades of selectively breeding and crossing the largest of the pumpkins to produce a prodigiously plump gourd.

But is bigger always better? Well, not so much. Much like you might find an enormous strawberry to be too watery and not sweet, you definitely won’t want to use any of these giant pumpkins for a batch of pumpkin bread. Gaining lots of water weight is their main purpose in this life, so they’re not the most flavorful pumpkins.

The prospect of 4,000- and 5,000-pound pumpkins is very much a possibility, and that’s both alarming and impressive. Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin could only dream of becoming so great.

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