Citrus Heights giant pumpkin sets new state record

Representing Central Valley pumpkin hopefuls, Ron Root and Nick Kennedy of Citrus Heights hauled their gargantuan gourd to Half Moon Bay for Monday’s Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-off.

They could have easily won Elk Grove’s Giant Pumpkin Contest, held Saturday and won by an Oregon-grown 1,941 pounder. (Russ Pugh took home to Eugene $7,000 from the Elk Grove contest.)

Instead, Root and Kennedy took their big boy to the Bay Area to see if maybe they had a record breaker.

They did. Shaped like a bean bag chair and the size of a couch, the striped Citrus Heights pumpkin set a California state record as the largest ever grown in the Golden State – quite a feat considering this was the 50th annual Half Moon Bay weigh-off to crown a pumpkin king.

For a while, the Citrus Heights pumpkin looked like an overall winner, but then officials hauled out the pumpkin that had traveled the farthest distance to the contest – an Atlantic Giant hybrid grown by Travis Gienger of Anoka, Minn.

A landscape business owner and instructor at Anoka Technical College, Gienger and his pumpkin team had driven almost non-stop from Minnesota to Half Moon Bay just in time for the weigh-off. He didn’t harvest his pumpkin until Saturday because these giants lose 5 pounds every day off the vine.

Gienger wasn’t a long shot; he was Half Moon Bay’s defending champion. Last year, he set a new America record with a 2,560-pound pumpkin that he also hauled cross country. But no one expected this result Monday (except for the folks tasked with lifting the pumpkin on the scale).

Gienger’s pumpkin weigh 2,749 pounds – a new world record and almost 200 pounds bigger than his 2022 American record setter. The old mark – 2,702 – was held by a pumpkin grown in Tuscany, Italy.

Watch Gienger’s reaction as his pumpkin is weighed, during live streaming of Monday’s weigh-off: