A married couple from New Zealand may have grown the world's biggest potato without even trying.
Colin and Donna Craig-Brown from Ngahinapouri in the Waikato region discovered the tuber growing in their garden as they were getting ready for spring planting.
"It was literally one of nature's little pleasant surprises," Colin Craig-Brown said in an interview with a Radio New Zealand affiliate. "I had no idea it was growing there, and I don't know how long it had been sitting there, because I'd been walking right over it all through last cucumber season."
Partner links: booking through them supports the blog at no extra cost to you.
The potato, which the couple named "Doug," could become the biggest in the world, weighing in at 7.9 kilograms (17.4 pounds). The current record belongs to British vegetable grower Peter Glazebrook, who in 2011 registered a potato weighing 4.98 kilograms (just under 10 pounds).
Although the Craig-Brown family is still waiting to hear from Guinness World Records, Doug has already lost a kilogram in the freezer, where he is currently being kept.
"He's happy in the freezer," Craig-Brown told Radio New Zealand's Jesse Mulligan. "Every now and then we take him out and set him in the sun so he can see the outside world."
Doug's very existence was a bit of a shock at first, since the couple had never set out to grow a giant potato, and its appearance is fairly unusual too, with Craig-Brown describing it as a "hideous thing."
"I had no idea what it was until I stuck a garden fork into it, pulled it out of the ground, gave it a bit of a scratch, poked it and had a taste," Craig-Brown said.
Interest in Doug was enormous and rather unexpected, leading to a "crazy" week for the Craig-Browns.
"As soon as we dug him up and everyone had a look, a feel, a stroke, a squeeze and all that, and we showed him off and posted him on Facebook, everything just took off," Craig-Brown said. "They call it going viral."
Once Doug's fame dies down, the plan is to turn him into vodka, which Colin says is a "fitting send-off."
"We'll hold a wake for him and raise a toast to Doug with the vodka I'll make out of him," he said.
