When is a pumpkin not a pumpkin?

TPP knows where the pumpkin capital of the USA is located.  Morton, a little town right here in Lincolnland. And very few pumpkins are grown there. The reason for this is that the jack-o-lantern pumpkin is not the pumpkin of pies, and it never has been. Usually the news media get this wrong, so what a surprise to read a correct and well-informed article about pumpkins, in the HuffPo!  Jack-o-lantern pumpkins are a very watery fruit, not as watery as a tomato, but watery none the less. The pumpkin of pies are from a different species of Cucurbita, basically big orange squashes. There is a variety of pumpkin/squash called a "sugar pumpkin" that are smaller, denser fruits, sometimes called "baking pumpkins", but TPP is not even certain if this is a C. pepo or one of the other species. In addition to jack-o-lantern pumpkins, this species includes all ornamental gourds, summer squashes, acorn, delicata, and spaghetti squashes. C. moschata includes the butternut and similar orange winter

squashes, but not all. The large Hubbard squashes, all the "giant pumpkins in the news", turban squashes, banana squashes, and a number of other varieties are C. maxima. So Cucurbitas can be pretty confusing.
Here's a cleverly carved "pumpkin". Do you know what this pumpkin is going to say? If not, then you don't know jack(o-lantern) about Who. 

Out of your gourd!

Fruits can best be defined as flowers at the stage of seed dispersal, and they all function to both protect and/or disperse seeds, more of one and less of the other depending upon the specific type of fruit. One of the ways in which humans have changed domesticated plants has been to select for bigger fruits. Natural selection would prevent plants from putting excess energy into rewarding fruits because of diminishing returns meaning that more fruit flesh would not disperse more seeds further, but since they are domestic and depending upon human intervention to reproduce, such wasted energy from the plant perspective is just what we want. And this is the time of year when human efforts to increase the size of fruits become very evident because pumpkins/squash, which are basically the same thing, have been selected to produce the largest fruits of all. This picture shows the Phactor admiring a 901 pound beast on display last year at the Great Pumpkin Patch in Arthur here in Lincolnland. But the all time grand champion was grown pumpkin, grown this year and on display at the New York Botanical Garden, is over twice as big at 1800+ pounds. The biggest one the Phactor has ever grown was a mere 150 lbs, and it was quite impressive; this year even zucchini didn’t grow well! Such huge pepos, the type of fruit, become flattened and deformed under their own weight, and naturally, well, naturally to an inquiring botanical mind, someone had to figure out how they managed not to simply burst open when they got so big. But why didn't they figure out how many pies this beast would make?