delight
He grew the world's heaviest pumpkin, alone, at 65
Fifty years of growing with his brother. This one he did alone.
A pumpkin named Bagheera weighed in at 2,856.8 pounds at the Wargrave Nursery Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off in England last week, the heaviest ever recorded. That is heavier than a white rhino. Guinness World Records was there to watch volunteers hoist it onto the scale. Ian Paton, 65, from Lymington in Hampshire, grew it alone, his first solo attempt after decades of growing giant produce with his brother Stuart. The pair broke the world record together last year. Going it alone, Paton said, was "bloody hard work." He spent six hours a day tending the gourd through a summer heatwave, giving it 130 gallons of water daily as it ballooned toward royalty. He named it after the black panther in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. "If that's not the very definition of awesome, I don't know what is," judge Gerald Short said. Bagheera will spend its retirement as cow feed.
