You Grew a 1200 Pound Pumpkin, You Won the Blue Ribbon, Now What?
The weigh-off is over. The cheering has stopped. You’ve posed for a dozen photos, and proven to everyone that you are, in fact, the gourd guru of your county.
Congratulations. Now you have to figure out what to do when you get your 1,200-pound problem home.
Once it’s back in your yard, sitting there like an escaped Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float, the real question emerges. What do you do with a vegetable that has its own gravitational pull?
First, Let's Get This Out of the Way: You Don't Eat It.
Seriously. Trying to make a pie from a prize-winning Atlantic Giant is a journey of culinary despair. These pumpkins are bred for one thing: getting ridiculously, absurdly large. Flavor, texture, and common sense were all sacrificed seasons ago in the name of mass.
The flesh is watery, stringy, and profoundly bland. Imagine trying to make soup from a water balloon that was merely shown a picture of a pumpkin. You’d have more culinary success licking the frost off your car in November. Don't do it. Your Thanksgiving guests will thank you.
So, with dinner off the table, what are your actual options?
Option 1: Forget the flesh. For a serious grower, the pumpkin is just a temporary orange bank vault, and the real prize is the treasure locked inside: the seeds. In the obsessive world of competitive growing, genetics are king. A seed from a random pumpkin is a gamble; a seed from a proven, 2,000-pound champion is like starting the race on the final lap.
This makes them extremely valuable. We're not talking about a casual seed swap. This is a strange, high-stakes stock market for pumpkin potential. Top growers trade these genetic lottery tickets like prized baseball cards. A single seed from a record-breaking pumpkin can be sold online to other aspiring growers for a shocking amount of money—in some cases, hundreds of dollars. The pumpkin wins the ribbon, but the seeds pay for next year's hobby and build a potential dynasty.
Option 2: Become a Hero to Local Livestock. Want to see pure, unadulterated joy? Give your giant pumpkin to a farmer. A half-ton gourd is basically the best day of a pig's life. Cows, goats, and chickens will also lose their minds over it. Your pumpkin gets to live out its final days as the single greatest meal an animal has ever seen. It’s a far more dignified end than slowly liquefying on your lawn.
Option 3: The Grand Finale of Spectacle. Your pumpkin was born for the spotlight, so why should its career end at the weigh-off?
Lawn Dominance: Carve it. You’ll need more than a kitchen knife—think power tools. A jack-o'-lantern the size of a Smart car is the ultimate way to assert horticultural dominance over your entire neighborhood. Your Halloween display wins. No contest.
Become Artillery: Take it to the Vermont Pumpkin Chuckin' Festival in Stowe. Here, your gourd achieves the most glorious end a vegetable can ask for: being yeeted across a field by a giant catapult or trebuchet. It’s physics, it’s for charity, and it’s spectacular.
Sail the Gourd-geous Seas: Yes, you can turn it into a questionably buoyant watercraft. Hollow it out, pop a paddle in your hands, and you’ve got a pumpkin kayak. It’s ridiculous, unstable, and an unforgettable way to spend a fall afternoon on Lake Champlain. A life jacket is not a suggestion.
Option 4: Return It to the Earth. When all else fails, you can chop it up (a workout in itself) and let your garden eat the evidence of your obsession. Composting a giant pumpkin returns a massive amount of nutrients to the soil you tormented all summer. It’s the circle of life, but with a lot more heavy lifting.
So while the blue-ribbon glory may be fleeting, the options for what to do with your enormous, orange trophy are, thankfully, endless. Just don't try to bake a pie. Seriously.