Big is good but heavy is better for giant pumpkin growers

October 11, 2014 at 5:17p.m.

CANFIELD

Some people might say Matt Brungard is a little bit, well, out of his gourd for his choice in hobbies.

After all, he grows pumpkins.

But he’s really good at it, and the pumpkins he grows are really, really big. No, make that huge.

So huge, in fact, that he took home the top prize Saturday at the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Grower’s annual weigh-off at Parks Garden Center. He received $5,000 for his efforts.

Pumpkin growers from at least three states brought their gigantic gourds to the contest, where bigger is better, but heavy is best. Brungard, 46, a fifth-generation farmer from New Middletown, topped them all with an entry that tipped the scales at a whopping 1,951 pounds, earning a standing ovation from the pumpkin enthusiasts who’d come to watch.

“I’m shocked,” a beaming Brungard said after his winning weight was announced. “I didn’t think I’d do it.”

Brungard’s entry barely bested a pumpkin grown by Mark Clementz of Howley, Mich., which weighed in at 1,947.5 pounds. Clementz still set the Michigan state record, though.

Dave Stelts, OVGPG board member, said it was the first time in the 20-year history of the local weigh-off that the 1,900-pound barrier had been broken. The average weight of the top 10 pumpkins at the weigh-off was 1,731 pounds, which Stelts said was a world record.

The Pennsylvania state record was also set Saturday at the OVGPG event with an 1,821.5-pound pumpkin grown by Larry and Gerri Checkon, who’d come from central Pennsylvania. They placed third in the competition. Stelts and his wife, Carol, who live in Enon Valley, Pa., held the previous Pennsylvania record at 1,807.5 pounds.

Brungard’s pumpkin was the heaviest ever weighed at the local contest, but was shy of the Ohio state record of 2,008 pounds, which was set earlier this year near Cincinnati. The world record is a 2,091-pounder grown in Switzerland earlier this year.