[imagesource: Donna Craig-Brown / Associated Press]

Last year, a couple from New Zealand stumbled upon what looked like a giant potato growing in their garden.

But Colin and Donna Craig-Brown didn’t plant potatoes, so the discovery was quite something.

Anyway, they named the burly thing Doug, or Dug – I prefer the latter for thematic reasons. After sampling it and confirming that it tasted like a raw potato, they did what any reasonable person who has found a massive vegetable in the garden would do.

They sent their submission for the World’s Heaviest Potato title to the Guinness Book of World Records.

The current record holder is a British man named Peter Glazebrook with his potato weighing around 4,98 kilograms.

Well, Dug weighs 7,8 kilograms, so take that, Glazebrook:

Now for that very sad news.

Dug was DNA tested, and it turns out he is not a potato, but a gourd or a tuber.

The Independent has the email from the record keepers who analysed Dug:

“Sadly, the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd,” the email said.

“For this reason, we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”

Expressing his disappointment at the news, Colin said: “What can you say? We can’t say we don’t believe you, because we gave them the DNA stuff.”

Heartbreak.

At least the full story is still full of that starchy goodness, starting with the moment they dug up Dug in Hamilton in August 2021:

Colin said, “I had a big hoe in my hand, and it went, ‘clonk,’” “I said to my wife, ‘What the hell’s that?’ I got a great big four-pronged garden fork and laid into it, like an over-excited Viking warrior. I thrust my foot deep into the earth, dragged this thing out, kicking and screaming. It was the size of a rubbish bin lid.”

Here’s Donna with Dug:

And Colin with Dug:

Cradling it like a newborn, as one does.

He still has Dug, stored safe and sound in the freezer:

“I say ‘gidday’ to him every time I pull out some sausages. He’s a cool character,” he said.

“Dug is the destroyer from Down Under. He is the world’s biggest not-a-potato.”

“Whenever the grandchildren come round, they say, ‘Can we see Dug?’”

The fact that the Craig-Browns don’t grow any potatoes, or gourds for that matter, has added a layer of mystery to this fine tale, reported Yahoo! News:

“There was a stage where I was growing these hybridized cucumbers, right where Doug appeared,” he said.

“During a hybridization process, who’s to say they didn’t crossbreed it with a gourd plant to give it tremendous disease resistance or prolific flowering?”

That’s the only possible theory that they’ve come up with for how Dug came into existence.

In the end, it’s become a happy accident, with Colin now motivated to actually attempt to grow a real giant potato and beat the current record.

[sources:independent&yahoo!news]