Only in Beverly Hills Calif.

We had the annual flying and swimming pumpkin harvest festival yesterday.  For those of you that are new or did not see last years post, the festival takes place in my Beverly Hills, CA backyard where we grow our pumpkins on a very steep hillside that is separated from our yard by an 8 foot retaining wall.  We build platforms under our Prizewinner and AG pumpkins to keep them from rolling down the hill as they grow.  This year we had 14 pumpkins to get down the hill and the best way to do it is to load them onto a tarp and bring them to the edge of the 8' high retaining wall and throw them into the pool.  The resulting depth charge type splash can reach 20 feet into the air.  We have to throw them in the deep end because they will plunge almost 8 feet down in the water when thrown from this height and come very close to hitting the pool bottom.  We cracked 3 pumpkins this year, either they hit the pool bottom or they were cracked while we were bring them down the hill which is ivy covered and results in all of us falling and sliding at times.  The largest of the pumpkins was weighed at just under 225 pounds and we had a very difficult time getting it down the hill.  The rest of the pumpkins weighed in between 100 and 190 pounds except for one that was just 58 pounds.  I'm thinking of giving up on AG's and just growing the Prizewinner because it is to dangerous getting anything over 200 pounds off the hill.  One friend that was helping us had a 125 pound pumpkin fall on him, he was not hurt, but if that had been a larger pumpkin he could have been badly injured. We can grow our Prizewinners to average well over 100 pounds and they carve up great for the big Halloween bash we throw every year.
 
Steve
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