Good gourd, that’s an absurdly big pumpkin

Apparently, Mother Nature has been hitting the gym this fall in the Big Veg department.

We're talking monster beets, colossal cucumbers and gourds that look like they've been pumped full of steroids. The kind of produce that makes your average grocery store haul look like a collection of dollhouse accessories. And some of these botanical behemoths are so enormous, they need forklifts instead of wheelbarrows.

Naturally, we're obsessed.

At September's National Giant Vegetables Championship in Worcestershire, England, growers showed up with produce that looked like it had been exposed to gamma radiation. Among the jaw-dropping entries? A 57-pound beetroot, a squash nearly five feet long and a cucumber plant stretching almost 25 feet into the air. Seven Guinness World Records were broken in all.

But the real star of the show, at least in our eyes, was a giant pumpkin grown by Graham Barratt. Measuring a whopping 130 inches around and weighing more than 1,000 pounds, this beast required some serious machinery just to get to the competition. Charlie Brown would lose his mind.

And just when you thought pumpkins couldn't get any more ridiculous, along came Ron Wallace of Rhode Island. On October 10, at the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Warren, Wallace smashed the Guinness World Record with a 3,156-pounder.

That's more than a ton and a half of squash. And the first pumpkin in history to break the 3,000-pound barrier. Even crazier? Wallace beat the previous world record by nearly 300 pounds, just one week after British grower Ian Paton had set it.

Talk about a growth spurt! Of course, at Hamilton, we have a soft spot for anything that pushes the limits of size and weight. Our only question: How big does a pumpkin have to get before it needs its own Hamilton trailer?

Go big or gourd home this Halloween!