LEWISTON – For six months Kathy Truong has had a monster growing in her backyard. Hulking, orange and sort of round, the monster grew as much as 26 pounds a day until it overtook an entire corner of her garden.

On Saturday, Truong hired a crew to load her mammoth, 736-pound pumpkin on a flatbed truck and haul it to the Cumberland County Fair. She hopes it will be recognized as at least one of the largest pumpkins of the year.

“I’m thinking maybe third place,” Truong said. She has heard that there might be a pumpkin topping 1,000 pounds as part of the competition.

She planted the gourd in the spring, and she expected it to be big.

“I started in April. I used very good seeds and a lot of fertilizer,” Truong said.

The success of the behemoth pumpkin was that it did not grow too much all at once. Too much of a growth spurt and the pumpkin could have cracked.

On Saturday, the potential prize-winner was completely intact. Intact and very heavy. Seven people were required to lift it onto a special pumpkin blanket (yes, they really make those) and then to carry it to a flatbed truck inch-by-inch. They groaned every step of the way.

“If you have 30 pumpkins to move, it makes for a long day,” said Truong’s son, Randall Sappington. He was helping out even though his own pumpkin was also going to the fair for competition.

With his pumpkin a scrawny 430 pounds. Sappington did not expect to take home a prize for size.

“I’m hoping to go for best-looking pumpkin,” he said.

His gourd was almost perfectly circular, unlike Truong’s, which had flattened on one side to give it a misshapen appearance.

“It’s an ugly mutt,” Sappington said.

Ugly or not, the giant pumpkin is off to the fair. Truong is confident her pumpkin is large enough to gain recognition, even with bigger monsters vying for the top prize.

She expects to learn how her pumpkin will be judged sometime this afternoon. After that, it will be time to start thinking about next year’s specimen.

Although this year’s pumpkin was humongous, when it comes to a county fair, bigger is always better.