THE BALLOON MAN

It's Rochester Fair time ...
 Must be giant pumpkin season

 

John Nolan/Times photo
Farmington farmer Hiram Watson is dwarfed by his best ever giant pumpkin, which is now an estimated 1,400 pounds, and still growing. Behind him, lurks a mere 1,000 pounder.
By JOHN NOLAN
from:  fosters.com
Thursday, September 13, 2012
FARMINGTON NH — In 2010, Hiram Watson, who grows fruit and vegetables on Meaderboro Road, achieved a rare double. He won the giant pumpkin contests in Sanford Maine, and Rochester Fair on the same day, with two different specimens.
His Rochester pumpkin weighed in at 1,192 pounds and his Sanford specimen tipped the scales at an eye-popping 1,309.5 pounds in the Downtown Legacy contest.
Now in his seventh year of growing giant pumpkins, Watson is set to shatter his own personal best, with a pumpkin that he estimates will be over 1,400 pounds. Because of its size, he is more likely to enter it into the Sanford contest, or even the Topsfield Fair, because both of these events have official weigh-ins supervised by the Giant Pumpkin Federation, where as Rochester does not.
That is not to say Watson will be absent from Rochester Fair weigh-in on Sept. 14 — his pumpkin patch, if "patch" is the word to describe an acre of land dedicated to Curcubita Maxima — contains three other monsters all nudging the 1,000 pound mark. Well, two as of last Thursday, for the day before he trucked a pumpkin over to Hopkinton Fair. It weighed 1,058 pounds, but didn't place. Top honors went to a Goffstown man with a pumpkin in excess of 1,300.
read more:
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120913/GJNEWS_01/709139731/-1/FOSNEWS