How giant pumpkins grow so big

Most people, the first question they ask is, is it real? And I ask, well where would you buy a fake pumpkin this big, right? Well, it's real. I'm a giant pumpkin grower as a hobby. I started probably eight years ago. Right now it's measuring about 1900 pounds, but this shape of this pumpkin is a little bit too hard to measure to get an accurate weight. So we'll see. So why do giant pumpkins get so big, but not other fruits like a strawberry? One of the reasons is that when growers are making a giant pumpkin, they actually do something to the plant, which is that they take off all the other growing pumpkins. So each plant only has one pumpkin that it's funneling all of its sugar water and resources into. And that helps make it extra big in a way that you might not see in the wild. When you're growing that fast, anything can happen with this thing. It could crack, it could blow out the rear of it. That's all happened to me. You push them pretty hard. The bigger that they get, they get really oddly shaped because of the weight and we keep it covered. We don't let the sun hit it at all, typically during the growing season. We want to keep the skin soft and not harden up and turn orange too quickly. So the pH is about, yeah, it's a little, it's definitely high. It's around eight. So I'll lower that down. I've never seen anything grow this fast. It's absolutely unbelievable when you actually are growing this. It still blows my mind that it actually gets a little scary at some point, right? You're like, wow, this thing's really taking off. How far is it going to go?