Updated Oct. 25, 2019 11:05 PM
Some people like to put pumpkins on their front porch and others, well, they like to sail them across the open water.
Justin and Christin Ownby own a farm in Cleveland, Tennessee. Among other things, they grow pumpkins. This year they cultivated an enormous pumpkin that Christin says is pretty special. The seed Justin used to grow the pumpkin came from a record-breaking pumpkin grown in the state that weighed more than 1,700 pounds.
“He got a pumpkin seed from that pumpkin and he grew it," Chistin told AccuWeather in an interview.
Justin said he started growing the prize-winning pumpkin seed in a greenhouse in April. In May he planted it in his garden and carefully tended to it all summer, a time when he said he had to be very mindful of the weather.
“Down here where we live in southeast Tennessee the biggest thing is the heat so I had to give it lots of water. It’s almost an everyday process of going out there and checking it. I’d go out there a few days after work and tend to the vines and prune it and see what it could do, find out what it’s capable of.”
Turns out, it was capable of quite a lot. When they finally cut the pumpkin off the vine in August it weighed in at a whopping 910 pounds.
"I had some friends and neighbors that helped us load it onto a trailer because our tractor wasn’t’ big enough to pick it up,” Justin laughed.
He was all set to enter it in the competition at the state's annual festival, the same one he got the seed from last year, but family plans intervened.
"So he was going to enter it into a competition but it ended up falling on the same day as a family trip so the next best thing was to make it a boat,” Christin said.
A boat? It may not seem like the obvious second choice but to Justin, who, by the looks of things, is the kind of guy who likes to have a "gourd time," making a sea-faring vessel was a no-brainer.
“Man, that would make a great boat.”
He told AccuWeather this was his first thought as Christin laughed and agreed. The couple is raising four small children and say the kids were all in on the pumpkin boating expedition. "We just kind of like to show them all kinds of things, let them experience lots of entertainment, different things, but they’re super excited about it."
How does one go about launching a pumpkin boat? Justin has an answer!
“It’s kind of funny, I had it on a trailer behind my truck and I just sort of backed it into the pond ... Like you would a boat into a lake.”
As his wife and kids cheered him on, Justin boarded his pumpkin boat and set sail. “It was hard, but the pumpkin grew with a flat bottom and that flat bottom on the water gave it a little more stability.”
Christin said all was going swimmingly until Justin got cocky. “It was when he started doing his impression of Washington crossing the Delaware that it actually fell over.”
Justin and Christin Ownby
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The 910 pound pumpkin after harvest.
Christin took video of the great pumpkin captain and sent it to a local news station. The video quickly went viral.
“Today is our nine-year wedding anniversary so yesterday I was thinking, you know, I’ll just contact our local news station and maybe a few people will see this and he’ll get a kick out of it. You know, happy anniversary, and we just cannot believe how quickly it just spread and people wanted to see and hear about it and we’ve just had so much fun and have laughed a whole lot about how our backyard shenanigans have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people now!”
This couple definitely knows how to give 'em pumpkin to talk about. Unfazed by the sinking of his pumpkin boat, Justin says he's going to try his hand at growing a massive gourd again next year. He'd like to top a thousand pounds.
“Next year we’ll try to go bigger.”
We're not sure if he means pumpkin growing or pumpkin boating, but you can bet your pumpkin pie we'll check in with the Ownbys next fall.
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