(WBIR) - There's a new champion after a heavyweight throw down at the Allardt Great Pumpkin festival this weekend. A Fentress County man now holds the record for the state's biggest pumpkin.
Kevin Garrett isn't Dr. Frankenstein, but he does have a medical background working as an EMT for the Fentress County Ambulance Service. After his 12-hour shifts he finds time to work in his garden which he calls a labor of love.
"I work second shift so I can usually scrounge up a couple hours of the morning before I take a nap and I've probably got approximately 300 hours in those pumpkin and watermelon this year," he said.
Aside from time, it takes several hundred gallons of water and several feedings of different kinds of fertilizer every week to pump up this record-breaking pumpkin.
"They're about the size of a tennis ball and in 105 days this one went to 1,405," he said.
That's 1,400 pounds and only a little bigger than his son Christopher's second place white pumpkin which clocked in at 1,337 pounds.
His 98-pound watermelon finished in fourth place.
Garrett's been growing big fruit for the past three years with the help of friends and family.
"I never thought of producing a state record. My goal this year was to produce a thousand pound pumpkin and it far exceeded my expectations," he said.
In Kevin Garrett's pumpkin patch, the ground is full of sand to allow the pumpkin to settle however it wants. Hard ground could cause the pumpkin to split.
"This pumpkin would consistently for over two weeks put on between 40 and 50lbs in 24 hours and it's the rate they grow that keeps me in it," he said.
Garrett begins his process in April and already has his eyes set on topping 15 hundred pounds next year, but that's not before carving up his new state record.
"We're going to try and carve these into huge jack o' lanterns and then we're going to get all the seeds out of them and dry them and anybody that wants a seed if they send us a bubble wrap we'll send them a seed if they want to try to grow one," he said.
For all his hard work Garrett picked up $1,500 in prize money, and placed in the top three in three different events.
