My cousin Dmitri is planning to break the 100 meters record today – Rowing in a PUMPKIN. He is setting off from Trafalgar Wharf at 1pm today in a giant pumpkin that has been hollowed out. We will be there, offering Stansted Farm Shop Pumpkin soup and offering our wholehearted support in this noble vegtable effort.
It’s blowing a gale at the moment, but hopefully if he survives the 100m vegetable dash, he can then go on to complete his main aim of crossing the solent to the Isle of Wight tomorrow. This is in a modified pumpkin that has an outboard motor on the back and some additional support.
Dmitri is filming the entire process for a new performance entitled, The Load of a Man is his Coracle, for which the he will attempt to journey from Portsmouth to the Isle of White in a hollowed out giant pumpkin. Mark O’Hanlon, winner of the UK’s heaviest pumpkin 2004, has grown a champion gourd weighing almost half a ton. Mark’s vegetable won first prize at this year’s Mere Brow pumpkin show in Lancashire, one of the largest events of its type in the UK. The prize winning pumpkin was shipped to Portsmouth where Dmitri Galitzine worked alongside a master boat builder to fit an outboard motor to the vegetable. The artist will journey into open sea for over three miles across one of the busiest shipping channels in the world. This will set a new Guinness World Record, marking the first time in history that a giant vegetable has crossed the Solent.
Now the exciting thing for you is that we will have a giant pumpkin at the farm shop, and you will also have the chance to buy seeds from the record breaking pumpkin at the farm shop. So next year, once we have all grown our giant pumpkins, we can have a monster vegetable regatta.
You can read more about it in the Daily Mail and the BBC websites.