A PUPIL from a Goostrey school has helped to grow a pumpkin that weighs as much as two grown men.

James Nelson’s giant fruit is so big it had to be transported in a trailer and cut using a wood saw.

His mother, Beverley, 35, said children and staff at Goostrey Primary School were amazed by the oversized fruit.

“I don’t think they’d realised how big it was going to be,” she said.

“They were all a bit gobsmacked to say the least.”

The family began growing pumpkins for Hallowe’en when James, five, and his cousin, Charlotte Peters, were first born.

Each year Beverley and her husband Matthew, 40, took a picture of the children with the fruits of their labour.

“It’s kind of become a bit of a family tradition,” said Beverley.

“It was just a bit of fun for Hallowe’en. With the first one we did you could get your arms around it and carry it.”

This year the family bought seeds that were supposed to create big pumpkins.

They then planted one near their manure heap.

Beverley, an optometrist, said the rainwater helped to spread some of the fertilizer onto the patch.

“There was no secret. We just left it,” she said.

“It just kept growing and growing.

“People from the area started to come around and look at it.”

James’ giant pumpkin eventually outgrew its cage, so the family had to build a fence around it.

Recently, the family wanted to know how much the pumpkin weighed.

But it was too large for ordinary scales.

So they had to take it to Jewsons, a builders’ merchants in Congleton.

Staff there hoisted the fruit into a digger that could lift and weight it.

“They took it very seriously,” said Beverley.

The family also called Goostrey Primary to see if they would be interested in the pumpkin.

The school asked them to bring it in for the day.

But then the family had the difficult task of transporting the 379lb fruit.

“We didn’t quite realise how heavy it was,” said Beverley.

“My plan was to hold onto it and lug it.”

But nobody could pick up the 172kg pumpkin, which weighs as much as an average gorilla.

So the family had to get a trailer to push it onto.

It took three people to heave the fruit into position.

Getting it into Goostrey Primary was also quite difficult.

“It only just fit through the school doors,” said Beverley.

The pumpkin then became the talk of the school in Main Road, Goostrey.

Teachers decided to let every pupil file through the classroom to look at the specimen.

It was then taken back to the family’s home in Congleton Road, Kermincham.

On Friday the family carved the pumpkin, which weighs the equivalent of 172 bags of sugar, and dressed it for Hallowe’en.

They had to use a wood saw, a jigsaw blade and a large metal spoon.

The family piled the contents into a wheelbarrow.

But some of the centre of the pumpkin was hollow.

Beverley said the family were not planning to use all of the fruit for meals.

“We might just have one meal tonight and leave it at that,” she said.