With the practice of Ice Baths becoming more popular and pumpkins season upon us, Sarah Witty found the perfect solution for her outdoor bathtub.
Sarah, from Maine, USA, combined her love of gardening with her creativity to make her own at home vegetable ice bath.
Sarah has been mastering the art of growing pumpkins since 2012 and decided to get more creative with her ideas and began the task of creating a bathtub out of one of her pumpkins.
“When I moved into my house in 2012, a pumpkin grew out of the old owner’s compost pile without me doing anything. It came from a Jack-O-Lantern seed that was thrown in the compost pile the year before.
“The plant took over the whole yard. Since it was so easy to grow those pumpkins without doing anything, I thought it would be fun and easy to grow a giant pumpkin. I found some seeds online, and I found out quickly that these pumpkins require a lot of work!
She has become totally devoted to the hobby and has since grown a multitude of pumpkins, with the heaviest weighing over 1,500lbs (680kg).
Named Snoop Gourd, she cut through the tough vegetable skin and made a bathtub sized hole with a chainsaw, swiftly filling it with water.
She even managed to have a five-minute dip in the gourd!
After finishing her bathtub project, she then began the process of preserving Snoop Gourd’s legacy, by replanting the pumpkin seeds.
Sarah said: “We are using a chainsaw to cut through the pumpkin. The walls are about 10 inches thick. It caused a huge mess, and I had to take apart the whole chainsaw to clean it afterwards! Dale removed the top which was very heavy, and then I collected all the seeds.
“There can be several hundred seeds in each pumpkin, and they are much bigger than normal pumpkin seeds! Then, we used a hose to fill up the pumpkin with water, and we let it sit overnight to get cold. We got snow overnight, so it was plenty cold.
“The weight of the water in the pumpkin caused it to burst, so we had to fill it back up with water before going in. There was a slow leak, but we were still able to take advantage of the cold! Dale and I each did a 5 minute cold plunge, and the neighbors thought we were crazy!
“Dale didn’t fit all the way in, so I’ll have to grow a bigger pumpkin next time. “We have been wanting to purchase our own ice bath, but we were too cheap to get one, so we figured a pumpkin was a good substitute! We also thought our friends and family would get a good laugh out of it.
“My first pumpkin was about 300 pounds. It fit in the back of my station wagon, and I drove it up to Canada (Windsor, Nova Scotia), the home of the Atlantic Giant pumpkin.
“I wanted to paddle in their pumpkin boat regatta, but when I opened up my trunk to show them my pumpkin, they laughed and said, ‘That’s too small!’
“From then on, it was my goal to grow the biggest pumpkin I could so that nobody would call my pumpkin small ever again.”