The great pumpkin of Florida

Here is a 700 pound beautiful pumpkin raised out in the vegetable fields and planted around the end of March and the beginning of April. This is not a native pumpkin to the State of Florida. This was grown here, but the seeds came from a prize winning pumpkin grower in Conneticut. The prize winning grower told the Florida grower that in Conneticut they normally grow to 1500 pounds. The Florida grower got an Agriculture person from the City of Deland to come over and tell him , the seeds needed to be planted in August so they would be ready by November. This makes a lot of sense to me, because the Florida heat is so intense. However, I believe this farmer has done extraordinarily well with heat, soil conditions and the rainy weather which we have endured this summer. He also has some other pumpkins still growing on the vines. He trims the leaves back and the other flowers back to give the pumpkin a chance to grow on the vine. He has one displayed that is 200 pounds at the vegtable stand. This pumpkin here we were told is starting to rot underneath so it won't get any bigger. It still looks like something that should be displayed at a grocery store or taken to the county fair where it could win a prize for biggest and fatest pumpkin grown in Florida. A long time ago, I went to my Uncle's funeral who lived in North Carolina with my dad. On the return trip home we stopped at this house which had a pumpkin patch outside. I took my dad's picture sitting in the middle of a pumpkin patch. Non of the pumpkins were 700 pounds like this one. Afterwards, we went inside where this lady who was a wife of a preacher was making homemade pumpkin pies from scratch. The kitchen had such a heavenly scent of fresh baked pumpkin pies, my dad bought one which we ate at a park on the way back to Florida. I think my dad would have been impressed by the size of those pumpkins. I think also he would have like to have tried planting a few to see how large they would grow. Unfortunately, he passed away many years ago, but I know this would have been the kind of thing that would peak his interest. Traveling to the vegtable stand, I also saw yellow flowers growing along the side of the road. My mom ask "Is it fall yet?"