With Halloween about a month away and pumpkin patches filling up, here is something to ruin the produce aisle for you forever: that pumpkin on your porch is not a vegetable. Botanically, every pumpkin is a fruit — and more specifically, it is a berry. The world-record pumpkin, at 2,819 pounds and 4 ounces, is the largest berry on Earth.
Sophie found this out the way you find out most unsettling truths: from Sprouty, in the garden, with zero warning.
"Carving a pumpkin this Halloween? You're carving a berry," Sophie said, eyeing the big orange one by the fence.
"A pepo berry! And at twenty-seven hundred pounds, it's the biggest berry on Earth!" Sprouty announced.
"So my jack-o'-lantern is a giant berry. Mind blown," Sophie admitted.
(Sprouty rounds the number for dramatic effect — the real record is 2,819 pounds, 4 ounces, set in October 2025. The details are below.)
Pepo: the berry with armor
Botanists classify the pumpkin as a pepo — a berry with a hard or leathery rind and a fleshy interior packed with many seeds. The pepo is the gourd family's signature fruit type: cucumbers, melons, watermelons, and squash are all pepos too (Wikipedia's Cucurbita entry; Science Notes). So the next time someone calls a cucumber a vegetable, you have ammunition.
Wait — what even counts as a berry?
Here is where it gets fun. In botany, a berry is a fleshy fruit that develops from a single flower with one ovary, with the seeds embedded in the flesh. Size has nothing to do with it — which is why bananas are berries, and strawberries, the fruit with "berry" right in the name, are not (Wikipedia).
A strawberry grows from a flower with many ovaries; the red part you eat is actually a swollen receptacle, and those little "seeds" on the outside are each their own tiny dry fruit (achenes). Botanists classify strawberries as aggregate accessory fruits — berry-adjacent in the kitchen, not a berry in the lab (Science Notes).
The heavyweight champion
The largest berry ever grown weighed 2,819 pounds, 4 ounces (1,278.8 kg) — heavier than many cars. Twin brothers Ian and Stuart Paton of Lymington, England, had it weighed on October 4, 2025, at the Wargrave Nursery Plant Center in Reading, setting two Guinness World Records: heaviest pumpkin and largest pumpkin by circumference, at 21 feet 3.8 inches around. They nicknamed it "Muggle," after the Harry Potter books (Smithsonian, October 2025; News for Kids).
The previous record — 2,749 pounds, set in October 2023 by Minnesota grower Travis Gienger — stood for two years before the Patons topped it.
The takeaway
Botany does not care what the grocery store calls things. A pumpkin is a berry in armor, a banana is a berry in disguise, and the strawberry — the berry-iest-looking fruit of them all — is technically neither. This Halloween, when someone admires your jack-o'-lantern, you get to be the interesting one at the party: you are looking at the largest berry on the planet.
Watch the reel
See Sophie and Sprouty break the news in 10 seconds:
Also on Instagram · TikTok · Facebook
For more plant science hiding in plain sight, see more SproutySpeaks stories.
