Europe’s heaviest pumpkin grown in Switzerland
And in the pale orange corner, weighing in at 856 kilograms … is the pumpkin grown by Switzerland’s Beni Meier, who on Sunday defended his title for Europe’s heaviest pumpkin.
This was puny compared with the monster cultivated by Meier last year, which tipped the scales at 1,054 kilograms – the weight of a small car – and entered the record books as officially the heaviest pumpkin ever grown.
Pumpkin-weighing has traditionally been part of the pumpkin festival at Ludwigsburg Palace just outside the German city of Stuttgart.
The biggest pumpkins will stay in Ludwigsburg until the celebrations on November 8, although they are not well suited for consumption because they are mostly water and have thick skins, an exhibition spokeswoman said.
Instead, she said, the pumpkins will be opened up for their seeds, which can be sold for a lot of money – sometimes as much as several hundred euros for one seed – and the pumpkin’s flesh is used as fertiliser or animal feed.
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