On Saturday, pumpkin growers competed for the largest pumpkin in the annual giant pumpkin festival on Logan’s Center Street.
This year’s winner of the festival was a pumpkin called Dough Boy, weighing in at 1917 pounds, grown by Alan Gebert.
The festival was held in downtown Logan. Growers from Utah and surrounding states brought their pumpkins to be weighed by the Giant Pumpkin Growers Association at the annual festival, hoping to be crowned the Center Street Giant and take home $5,000.
Mark Anderson is the president and owner of Anderson Seed and Garden, and co-creator of the festival, which has seen significant growth and community interest since its first event in 2023. Last year, the festival saw an estimated 20,000 attendees, and the projected numbers for this year looked similar.
“We like forklift them and lift them up and get them on the scale and stuff for them. So, yeah, that's pretty cool, yeah," Anderson said. "And then after our way off it is done, like, within a couple days, you can go onto their website and you can see how all of our pumpkins line up with everybody else's around the country."
“I think we had like, 60 vendors that first year, which we thought was, like, wow," he continued. "And then last year we had close to 100 so we, like, almost, we, well, we doubled it, yeah, we doubled it. And then this year we've got like 120 to 130.”
Ronnette Anderson explained that a central goal of starting the festival was to bring the community together.
“Everybody's happy, anything and everything that's going on wrong in the world right now, they forget about it. We don't care what political rights you've got," she said. "We don't care what your beliefs are, everybody comes in and they're having so much fun, and they're just they're all together, they're all smiling and being happy, and it's for that. It's just being able, again, to get the community together, get together.”
