August 9, 2004
Norman Park - You usually only see them around Halloween, but pumpkins are growing in south Georgia right now. And, they aren't the typical ones that fit on front porches.
It's hard not to noticed the speckled orange dots in the Moxley's Norman Park front yard. Ten-year-old Mary Jo Moxley sits on the pumpkin and smiles, "It just became a hobby."
A hobby that has turned into an obsession for her dad Mike Moxley. He points at the numerous gigantic pumpkins, "They've kind of grown wild. This is only two plants, just from two seeds, they've taken over the entire area."
The largest pumpkin is around 400 pounds, meaning the meat is about 340 pounds. That's a whole lot of pumpkin pie! Twelve-year-old Angela Moxley laughs, "More than I can eat!" Her dad guesses, "I would gather it's a total of over 1,900 pounds of pumpkin right now, I don't know how much a pumpkin pie weighs."
Pumpkin seeds bought on the internet from Canada. Mr. Moxley explains, "The seeds for these two plants came from a pumpkin that weighed 1,178 pounds, so they would laugh at mine, if we were in Canada."
But we're not in Canada, we're in Norman Park. Mary Jo says, "Some of my friends that come over say, man, those are really big pumpkins, you could probably fit inside one of them."
You may be ask yourself, why Moxley got into growing gigantic pumpkins? We'll, it started with giving his daughter's Angela and Mary Jo a fun thing to do. Mary Jo laughs, "Yeah."
But, now they are older. Angela admits, "I don't come out out here and help, I may come out and measure sometimes, it's mainly daddy."
The pumpkins are all his. Mr. Moxley is always trying to tinker with changes, hoping one day to beat the state record of nearly 700 pounds.
Mr. Moxley says he will probably have to pick the pumpkins this week because the vines are rotting, but he will have to find a scale big enough to weigh the pumpkins.
posted at 5:55PM by kathryn.simmons@walb.com
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