Guess How Much This Giant Wyoming Pumpkin Weighs

A rainy Saturday in downtown Sheridan, Wyoming, brought me and 3 friends to Cottonwood Kitchen + Home. There, in the windows, were 2 big pumpkins, both locally grown. The biggest one weighed in at --- well --- I have no idea. They are asking people to guess.

The four of us got so caught up in the question of how how to calculate how much a pumpkin could weigh just by looking at it that we never heard the nice young lady tell us what the prize for guessing is.

Have a look at the photo above and see what you can figure out. To help with some scale, that's me with my hand on that big sucker. I'm 6ft 1inch tall.

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These days you can look up anything online. I found a handy way to make an educated guess. It is actually a bit easier than figuring out 'could an unladen swallow carry a coconut or what is the airspeed velocity of a swallow?'

The weight can be found by taking careful measurements and then using a formula to calculate the weight. OH LORD - MATH - Very sorry.

But rather than typing this up like some boring textbook, here is a video on how to guess the weight.

These formulas are based on the original work of Bob Marcellus. Bob collected and tabulated the Over The Top measurements for many pumpkins over a number of years. His tables for estimating weight from circumference or OTT measurements appeared in the book "How-To-Grow World Class Giant Pumpkins, II", by Don Langevin and published by Annedawn Publishing, Norton, MA. YES - This is actually published work, - so - SCIENCE!

This is what the pumpkin in their other store window looked like. It's a bit smaller but just as hard to guess.