What do you do with a heavyweight pumpkin after setting a New Zealand record with it?
"Everyone asks that," said Alan Barton who, with his six-year-old daughter, Ruby, and his mother, Eve, grew a 364kg monster on Mrs Barton's lifestyle block at Parua Bay.
They entered the Atlantic Giant pumpkin in the
Royal Easter Show at Auckland, where it won a supreme champion ribbon in the vegetable section. It also broke the 334kg national record set by a pumpkin grown by Steve Ironmonger in 2005.
Show organiser Gaylene Ashton said the pumpkin had originally weighed 342kg, but when it was weighed again on different scales yesterday, it had come up even heavier - at 364kg. Mr Barton, a doctor training in emergency medicine at Auckland Hospital, commutes between the big smoke and Parua Bay with his family - wife Heidi, Ruby and three-year-old Max. They got seeds for the prize pumpkin from Heidi's aunt in Canada who had obtained them from a grower
who produced a 696kg world-record pumpkin in 2008.
Mr Barton said it was his, Ruby and Eve's first attempt at growing a giant pumpkin. But they intend saving the seeds from their champ and try to grow a bigger one.
Monster pumpkins were apparently unpalatable for humans because their flesh was very watery, Mr Barton said. But he and his family planned to try the pumpkin to see if that was true. If it was, a couple of pigs on the lifestyle block would soon be looking at the biggest feed of their lives.
