Two trucks were pushing two of the most beautiful pumpkins anyone has ever seen in a Half Moon Bay parking lot.
The host, Cameron Palmer, who is the name of the local British bar and wears a suit with pumpkin art on it, gushed over the pumpkins’ hot orange colors, tight stems, and curvy bodies.
One pumpkin looked like a mutant apple with a swollen shape. The other was five times bigger and looked like a deflated poop emoji, but in the world of extreme gardening, it is good enough for the centerfold.
About 200 people in the area yelled insults and cheered for the “prettiest pumpkin” winner.
It is a big honor, but in the end, everyone has their own idea of what makes a pumpkin beautiful. It is hard to pick just one. The host said that Eric Carlson, Hailey, and Patrick Winnen were all tied.
They each won $500, but it was just a reward for being there. The big event at the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off is not how pretty the pumpkin is, but how fat it is.
The grower of the fattest pumpkin wins $9 per pound, or $30,000 if they beat last year’s world record of 2,749 pounds.
The biggest prize for the biggest size
Farmers from all over the country who have figured out how to grow pumpkins that weigh more than a metric ton come to the event every year. Over fifty pumpkins were brought to the stage by forklifts one by one.
The whole thing took more than five hours. A group of judges from the official Great Pumpkin Commonwealth governing body checks the gourds for rot or holes (more than two will get them disqualified).
The pumpkins are then put on a scale so that their girths move around a little, like October Jell-O. The weight shows up as a computer number when you press a button. This is where dreams come true or break.
Around 9 a.m., SFGATE’s three-person pumpkin reporting team got there, but the competition was already well under way, with TV news crews on either side of the stage.
The first pumpkins were the best in the patch, but they still looked like they belonged outside of a Trader Joe’s. The finalists, on the other hand, looked like a mix between Jabba the Hutt and a dorm room-smelling bean bag chair.
An emcee told jokes, some of which came from ChatGPT, to pass the time while the forklift drivers moved the gourds to the stage.
People in the area groaned, but a group of students liked the computer-generated jokes better and teased the host with dystopian chants of “AI! AI! AI!” The public address speakers played a version of Mike Myers’s song “Just the Two of Us” from the 1999 movie “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.”
This version of the song probably has not been heard in public since this time last year. As you might have guessed, Jim Stevens sang a lot of sweet folk songs about pumpkins that were as heavy as a 2006 Toyota Corolla.
Palmer introduced Al Adreveno early in the event, which lasted from 5 a.m. to about 2 p.m. He is 101 years old and served as mayor of Half Moon Bay in 1971.
It is said that while the mayor of Circleville, Ohio, was in California, he learned that Half Moon Bay said it was the pumpkin capital of the world. He then denied this claim. The two mayors got together and decided to end their fight with a pumpkin weigh-off.
Palmer cut to Adreveno and said, “You made this nightmare happen for us.”
The pumpkin that Circleville brought in weighed 173 pounds. Half Moon Bay’s score was 174.
“Back then, we just went out into the field and picked the biggest pumpkin we could find,” Adreveno told SFGATE from a horse-drawn John Deere.
The event changed Half Moon Bay’s history forever and made its annual pumpkin fair one of, if not the best event in the world devoted to a decorative fruit.
Oh my gourd
Pumpkins do not come from just any patch these days. A 44-year-old teacher from Anoka, Minnesota, which is known as the Halloween capital of the world, won last year.
He won the race with an Atlantic giant variety that weighed 2,749 pounds. For his prize, he got a ring and jacket that look like they belong in the Super Bowl.
Two of his pumpkins died this year, so he named the third one Rudy after the hero of the classic underdog football movie.
Each seed can cost up to $50, and farmers usually plant them on April 10. For the roots, they feed the plants chemicals like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, a bacillus mix, and mycorrhiza.
The pumpkins grow at a rate of 70 pounds per day during the last 120 days. He aimed to gain three thousand pounds this year. The founder of the Raising Cane’s fast food business has already bought Rudy to be carved and shown off at an event in Los Angeles later this month.
As the last 10 pumpkins were taken to the stage, their diameters kept going up and up. Sadly, one pumpkin was disqualified because it had three holes in the bottom.
All four of them weighed more than 2,000 pounds.
After Brandon Dawson of Santa Rosa talked about how hard it was to drive his second-place pumpkin through San Francisco (it weighed an impressive 2,465 pounds), defending winner Gienger’s pumpkin was saved for last.
Rudy was finally put on the scale by a truck. As the emcee revealed the weight, “Eye of the Tiger” played over the speakers. It was 2,471 pounds, which was just a bit less than his pumpkin from last year but still enough to win first place.
The crowd went crazy, and all of the farmers came together to cheer on Gienger’s win. There was not a single person who was upset about losing in that group.
“It is the greatest prize for the greatest size, but everyone wins,” that folk singer had crooned earlier that day.
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