Far far a-weigh
Gather round, children, and I'll teach you how you can emulate my triumph in guessing the weight of the pumpkin at the Wisley Harvest Festival 2015.
I have unfortunately not got a picture of the vegetable in question; at the time, the stall was a bit cluttered with people and didn't make a terrribly good composition, and of course I wasn't expecting it to be so significant!
So I went trawling through the archives to see if I could find something similar...
Well, last year we found a display of carved pumpkins around a tree at Richmond Park. We didn't go to Wisley, so we don't know what might have been there.
2013: We found a pumpkin inside an oven at Leith Hill Place!
We did go to Wisley, but If there were any pumpkins, I didn't photograph them.
In 2012, we didn't do anything at all to fit the theme, so here's a moody autumn tree instead.
2011, it was a lot warmer for Wisley, but still no photographic evidence of pumpkins. And I wouldn't want people to think I only take pictures of pretty girlies.
2010: We did find some pumpkin lanterns at Petworth House.
BUT LOOK!!! It's the 2010 Wisley Pumpkin!!! I didn't enter the competition, though. This pumpkin is about the right size, but a different shape, so we won't use it for the lesson.
2009. Lots of pumpkins at Wisley, but no guess-the-weight competition this time that I recall.
Ok, 2008 is another year with nothing relevant, so let's have a shiny Prince Albert in the sun. After the Royal Parks Half-Marathon as it happens.
We were in Japan the autumn of 2007. They don't have pumpkins but they do have these things. I don't know what they are, but they look vaguely squashy so they'll have to do.
And if you ever see bottles like this purporting to be 'wine', beware! The white is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever had in my mouth and the red is worse :-(((
2006... Yes, yes, I'm pushing it a bit. Well these were very big fungi.
2005, still struggling: this is the kitchen garden at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, and after all, you never know, they might be growing pumpkins there...
Ah, at last! 2004, and another pumpkin, even if it is a bit on the small side. Theo thinks it's interesting anyway.
Now, back to the lesson!
First, imagine that the pumpkin above is much larger than Theo, but about the same shape, maybe a bit flatter. You look at it and you think, "Hmm, that's about half a metre across, but it's quite oblate so it'll be less than a sphere of that diameter. Let's say it's about the same volume as a sphere of diameter 40cm. Now, the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi-r-cubed, and for our purposes, pi is close enough to three so we'll cancel it out leaving a factor of 4. Right, 40cm diameter means 0.02m radius, so r-cubed is 0.008; Four times that is 0.032 and at a tonne per cubic metre, that has to be 32kg. Sanity check for the decimal point? 320kg is four times what I weigh and 3.2kg is a couple of bags of sugar, so no way, 32kg it is."
You write this down and pay your 50p entry, confident that you're in the right ballpark, and then are somewhat flabbergasted to receive the call telling you not only have you won, but you were only about 20g out!
So now you know.
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