PHOTO: Students from the Newton North/South high school robotics club, the LigerBots, display a guillotine to crush pumpkins with at Newton’s Pumpkin Smash 2024 on Saturday, Nov. 2. Photo by Bryan McGonigle
Newton’s DPW hosted the fifth annual Pumpkin Smash event at City Hall on Saturday, complete with a catapult and a guillotine.
Families brought their Halloween gourds—big and small, scary and cute—to City Hall to destroy them in a variety of ways while learning about the work the DPW does for the city.
There was a traditional bull’s-eye target to throw pumpkins at and a high-tech guillotine. The guillotine was triggered by a robot off to the side, which would bounce a ball off a lever, activating a switch to bring a weight crashing down on the pumpkin.
There was also a massive catapult, for people who prefer medieval warfare over the French Revolution.
“The one where they’re just smashing them themselves is a big hit too,” Mayor Ruthanne Fuller said as she greeted families with DPW Commissioner James McGonagle.
It’s unclear how many pumpkins were brought in and smashed up. But there were a lot. Literally tons.
“We’ll have a measurement in tons afterward,” McGonagle said.
The event also teaches kids about environmentally sound practices like turning pumpkins into soil. And that’s what will happen with the pile of pumpkin bits left behind from the Pumpkin Smash. Black Earth, a composting company that recycles food scraps from communities all over New England and turns them into soil to sell to garden supply stores, is managing the pumpkin composting.
“They’ll go back and weigh everything. We’ll have thousands of pounds of pumpkins,” McGonagle said.
Check out these photos from Newton’s Pumpkin Smash 2024.
