SHELBURNE FALLS — What’s the biggest pumpkin you’ve ever seen? If your answer is under 1,000 pounds, that might change if you’re in Shelburne Falls for Halloween.
In preparation for the Topsfield Fair’s Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off on Oct. 2, Shelburne Falls resident Paul Hollings grew a pumpkin that weighed in at 1,274 pounds. According to a post on the fair’s Facebook page, Topsfield resident Woody Lancaster took home the night’s top prize with a 2,598-pound pumpkin. Hollings came in 14th place out of 19 entries.
The 1,274-pound pumpkin will be the spectacle of Mechanic Street in Shelburne Falls on Halloween night, after Hollings carves it and makes a jack-o’-lantern.
“First, you have to get the right seeds,” Hollings said. “People have been growing these [pumpkins] bigger and bigger every year, and they cross-breed with other large pumpkins to get the biggest one. When I started doing this 30 years ago, the largest pumpkin hadn’t reached 1,000 pounds yet.”
This year’s product was by far the largest pumpkin that Hollings has ever grown. In the last two years, his pumpkins have weighed 590 and 758 pounds. That 758-pound pumpkin came in 20th place out of 30 entries at the Topsfield Fair in 2025 (though it did win a $200 prize for the ugliest pumpkin).
Hollings said that after receiving some seeds from fellow giant pumpkin growers at last year’s Topsfield Fair, the 600-square-foot space in his garden designated as the pumpkin growing zone was overtaken by the deep-orange gourd.
“I prepare the soil a lot, I put a lot of compost in there. I’m all organic,” Hollings said. “I get the soil test results from UMass Amherst’s soil testing laboratory, and my results always come out super-charged with all of the nutrients you need. They probably tell me I’ve got too much in here, but I think it’s important to have a luxury level of nutrients in the soil.”
This year’s pumpkin is so large that the regular pumpkin-lift needed some mechanical help. In the past, Hollings, a group of friends and fellow giant pumpkin enthusiasts have lifted the pumpkin into the back of a truck before driving it to Topsfield for the fair.
The pumpkins have been major attractions for trick-or-treaters in Shelburne Falls.
“They love it. Everybody’s posing with it or saying like, ‘Oh my God, look at that,'” Hollings said about the reaction to his giant jack-o’-lanterns in previous years. “One sweet thing that happened, my partner was sitting in the living room and heard through the open window a little girl walk by with her mother and say, ‘Hey mommy, isn’t that where the big pumpkin was last year? You think they’re going to do it again this year?'”
A big pumpkin means a long and intensive growing process. Hollings starts growing almost six months ahead of the Topsfield Fair, with the gourd growing under lights in his basement in late April before being transferred to the garden. From then on, this process isn’t like the rest of the plants in his 3,000-square-foot vegetable garden.
“I use rebar and PVC pipes to create an arch, and then I put this row cover over it,” Hollings explained. “What I’m learning this year is that squash vine borers are active for about five weeks, so there’s almost no way to stop them. I took [the row cover] off during the heat spell in July because I thought it was getting too hot under there. We did get some squash vine borer damage … but I fished them out with a safety pin.”
Aside from the pests, Hollings said he is constantly checking for tertiary vines that he can cut so it doesn’t take nutrients away from the main vine connected to the plant.
“You want your pumpkin to set on the main vine,” Hollings said. “Everywhere there’s a leaf, there are two things happening: there are roots going down and up if there’s soil on top of it, and there’s a secondary vine going out from that point. You’ve got a root and a vine growing out from each leaf node. The roots are wonderful because they feed the pumpkin … but then the secondary vines will put out tertiary vines if you let them. You don’t want that, because it takes away too much energy that you want going toward the pumpkin and it crowds the space too much.”
There’s also a myth when it comes to giant pumpkin growing: do the growers feed milk to the pumpkin? The answer, according to Hollings, is no. Despite it’s big size and the even bigger responsibility of keeping tabs on the more labor-intensive growing process, a giant pumpkin is still a pumpkin.
“I spend way too much time on this thing,” Hollings said, adding that the work was a labor of love. “If I was just growing regular pumpkins, I’d pretty much ignore them. I’d water them, I’d fertilize them and then just let them do whatever they do.”
What keeps Hollings going is the reaction from the youngsters in Shelburne Falls.
“We’re a destination site for trick-or-treaters,” Hollings said. “There’s two blocks on Mechanic Street and two blocks on Main Street here in Shelburne where people come in droves from the hilltowns and the farms. … We get about 700 trick-or-treaters. That’s really my prime motivation for doing this.”
