Pumpkin records were squashed. The awesome statistics for the Collector Village Pumpkin Festival are, well, awesome:
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- More than 18,000 went to the festival - Collector has a population of 330.
- The champion pumpkin was 217 kilograms, more than double the weight of the grower.
- 330 litres of soup were cooked by 12 volunteers - that's 1,080 cups.
What the bald figures don't show is how much fun there was to be had, from a maze made of hay bales to food from the four corners of the world to enough soup to drown a town in.
And pumpkins. Lots of pumpkins.
The winner was grown by Terry Kiernan who weighs 105 kilograms, less than half the size of the vegetable.
He said the secret of the winning size was "great community spirit, luck and heaps of water."
Community spirit because local people helped. One farmer granted access to the ordure of his cows. "Another farmer brought his front-loader and moved 72 cubic metres of compost," said the grower.
But the big ingredient was water. He said one pumpkin needs 200 litres per day. The winner was grown at Captain's Flat, with the seed planted back in November.
Mr Tiernan said that the water was supplied to his roof by storms and from other ample sources in the area.
The pumpkin now goes on show along with what Mr Tiernan calls the "secret ingredients". After that, he said he would eat it though it would take him a year - just in time to start again at next year's festival.
He got into pumpkin growing as he recovered from a heart attack. It is good exercise, the 70-year-old said, because of all the spade work and the lugging of water. "You're in a perpetual motion of watering," he said.
The second and third prize-winners were both pumpkins grown by Matt Lawliss, and they weighed in at a mere 119 and 113.5 kilograms.
The festival overall was deemed a success by treasurer, Linda Wilson. It was too early for a definite assessment of numbers but she thought attendance was more than last year's 17,000 to 18,000. Some had to park a mile from the ground - far enough to walk off the calories from the ample food on sale.
