Connolly hopes it will be the biggest pumpkin the world has ever seen

For five months, he has slaked its thirst with a garden hose, shaded it from the sun with a cotton sheet, kept off the rain with a plastic tarp. He regularly fed it an exotic recipe of ground bone, blood, fish, molasses, and cow and chicken manure. Now more than 16 feet around and weighing an estimated 1,878 pounds, it is packing on 11 pounds a day.

In a week, when he loads it on a truck and takes it to Frerichs Farm in Warren R.I., Connolly hopes it will be the biggest pumpkin the world has ever seen, smashing the record of 1,689 pounds and possibly coming in at more than a ton, an accomplishment that is to competitive pumpkin growing what the 4-minute mile was to track and field.

Connolly and his leviathan are products of a hobby that has undergone a stunning transformation over the last decade, morphing from a pastoral pastime that produced 400-pound champions to a full-time obsession whose practitioners have so successfully tinkered with pumpkin genetics and finely honed growing techniques that they are now regularly producing record-smashing freaks that can grow 40 pounds in a single day and weigh as much as a car.

Even in that world, where a single champion seed can fetch $500 and the techniques for growing a giant gourd are guarded like state secrets, the epic girth of Connolly's pumpkin has electrified. Wide-eyed growers, who have been making pilgrimages to behold Connolly's creation, have respectfully dubbed his pumpkin "The Beast from the East."

"For somebody that's seen big pumpkins - and I've seen 'em all - this thing takes your breath away," said Don Langevin of Norton, author of the book "How to Grow World-Class Giant Pumpkins." "You sit next to it and it looks like you can get into it like a car. When you see it, it blows your mind."

On Wednesday night, Connolly, a 53-year-old manufacturing engineer, was all quiet nerves, like an athlete awaiting his Olympic debut. Speaking modestly of his pumpkin - "to me, it doesn't look that big, but the numbers tell the tale" - he ticked off a list of worries. Teenagers, he said, could smash the pumpkin in the night or it could absorb so much water that it cracks, disqualifying it from competition. He must also hoist the pumpkin off its bed of pink mesh and beach sand and into the back of his truck, without ripping it apart. He has constructed a crane of straps, chains, and pulleys for the job.

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Thanks Rich!