When is a potato not a potato?
When it is a tuber of a gourd, Guinness World Records said.
A New Zealand couple who believed they had dug up the world’s largest potato in the garden of their small farm near Hamilton have had their dreams turned to mash after Guinness wrote to say that scientific testing had found it was not a potato after all.
Photo: AP
Colin Craig-Brown, who first hit the tuber with a hoe in August last year when gardening with his wife said it sure looked and tasted like a potato.
Mind you, he added, he has never tasted a gourd tuber.
“What can you say?” he said. “We can’t say we don’t believe you, because we gave them the DNA stuff.”
After months of submitting photographs and paperwork, the couple got the bad news from Guinness in an e-mail last week.
“Dear Colin,” the e-mail begins, going on to say “sadly the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd. For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”
The couple had named their find Doug, which they took to spelling Dug, after the way it was unearthed. The tuber became something of a local celebrity, after the couple began posting photographs of it on Facebook with a hat on and even built a cart to tow it around.
An official weigh-in at a local farming store put Doug at 7.8kg, equal to a couple of sacks of regular potatoes, or one small dog.
The existing Guinness record stands — a 2011 monster from Britain that weighed in at just under 5kg.
Craig-Brown remains a believer in Doug, who still sits in their freezer.
“I say ‘gidday’ to him every time I pull out some sausages. He’s a cool character,” he said. “Whenever the grandchildren come round, they say: ‘Can we see Doug?’”
“Doug is the destroyer from Down Under,” Craig-Brown said. “He is the world’s biggest not-a-potato.”
Craig-Brown said he is not done yet with chasing the potato record. Dug was self-sown, but Craig-Brown said that with all his subsequent research into giant potatoes, he is ready to try and deliberately grow a record-breaking monster next season.
And this time, it will definitely be a potato.
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