JACKSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio, USA -- Christy Harp,
a local High School math teacher, has grown a 1,725 pounds
pumpkin-which sets the new world record for the Largest
pumpkin.
Photo: Christy Harp shows off her world-record
1,725-pound Atlantic giant pumpkin. The Jackson High School
teacher won $2,500 and set the record at a competition in
Canfield on Saturday. Photo Scott Heckel / The Canton Repository
(enlarge
photo)
Christy Harp and her husband, Nick,
have been growing giant pumpkins for the past eight years.
For Christy, growing gargantuan gourds has
become a personal challenge since the eighth grade, and is
now a bit of a hobby at the family farm. This year, she and
her husband decided to have a little contest.
"Last year he beat me by 200 pounds. This year
I beat him by 400 pounds. Very good year! My pumpkin, my side
of the patch! We separate the patch and never step foot on
the other side!"
Christy says at one point in August, the
pumpkin was growing 33 pounds a day.
Her secret to growing such a large pumpkin?
“Pulling all the weeds and being out in the patch lots of
hours,” she said, noting that the boulder-sized pumpkin grew
at about 33 pounds a day.
"We filled up the soil with lots of compost,
coffee grounds, cow manure, and then we pick out seeds with
good genetics."
For her efforts, Christy Harp won
the $2,500 cash prize for first place and bragging rights
for the next year. Hers was the heaviest
pumpkin weighed at the annual Ohio
Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers weigh-off at Parks Garden
Center on state Route 62 in Green Township.
“We’ve always felt that the big pumpkin for any
one of us is a victory for all of us,” said Tim Parks, owner
of the garden center and a director of the OVGPG.
When it was all over, Harp and her husband,
Nick, were hoisted onto the shoulders of some of the men she’d
dethroned, and they all celebrated her victory.
Ohio
Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers director and secretary/treasurer
Alan Gibson said some of the seeds from the winning pumpkins
will be available for the club's seed auction, which is planned
for 8 p.m. Nov. 28 and 29 on the club Web site at www.ovgpg.com.
He explained that one seed can go for as
high as $30. Proven seeds, such as seeds responsible for world
record-holding pumpkins can go anywhere from $200 to $500
per seed on the Internet. If that records holds after the Circleville,
Ohio Pumpkin Festival, her pumpkin will go on to New York
City and be carved by a master carver on Times Square.
Related world records: Heaviest
gooseberry-world record set by Bryan Nellist
