News — JerseyLiving
When his giant pumpkin began adding about 25 pounds a day by mid-July, Mathew Metta thought he had a good shot at producing New Jersey’s largest pumpkin
By early October, his six-month vigil—feeding his pumpkin 100 gallons of water a day, keeping away bugs and deer, and cutting back any other pumpkins that might siphon off water and nutrients—was almost over. Now all he had to do was get his 5-foot-wide fruit (yes, a pumpkin is considered a fruit) to the Salem County Fairgrounds. Last year marked Metta’s second attempt to grow a pumpkin large enough to enter in the pumpkin weigh-off, one of the most anticipated events of the South Jersey Pumpkin Show, an annual two-day celebration of the rotund squash. The year before, his largest...