Wellington: When is a potato not a potato? When it’s a tuber of a gourd, in keeping with Guinness World Data.
A New Zealand couple who believed they’d dug up the world’s largest potato within the backyard of their small farm close to Hamilton have had their desires turned to mash after Guinness wrote to say that scientific testing had discovered it wasn’t, in reality, a potato in any case.
What was believed to be the world’s largest potato sits on a kitchen bench of the house of Colin and Donna Craig-Brown.Credit score:AP
Colin Craig-Brown, who first hit the tuber with a hoe final August when gardening along with his spouse Donna, stated it positive appeared and tasted like a potato. Thoughts you, he added, he’s by no means tasted a gourd tuber.
“What are you able to say?” stated Craig-Brown. “We will’t say we don’t imagine you, as a result of we gave them the DNA stuff.”
Donna Craig-Brown holds “Doug”.Credit score:AP
After months of submitting pictures and paperwork, the couple received the unhealthy information from Guinness in an electronic mail final week.
“Pricey Colin,” the e-mail begins, happening to say “sadly the specimen just isn’t a potato and is in reality the tuber of a sort of gourd. For that reason we do sadly must disqualify the applying.”
The couple had named their discover Doug, which they took to spelling Dug, after the way in which it was unearthed. The tuber grew to become one thing of a neighborhood celeb, after the couple started posting pictures of it on Fb with a hat on and even constructed a cart to tow it round.
An official weigh-in at a neighborhood farming retailer put Dug at 7.8 kilograms, equal to a few sacks of standard potatoes, or one small canine. The prevailing Guinness document will stand, a 2011 monster from Britain that weighed in at slightly below 5 kg.
