An Abundant Harvest

© Liz / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0

Gardening is a calming, gentle pastime, but . . . not for everyone. A small, global community of dedicated growers engage in the highly-competitive world of giant vegetable growing.

Equipped with the calculating foresight of a chess player, the dedication of a Medieval monk and the improvisational genius of a NASA engineer, giant vegetable growers have cultivated massive produce.

Take for example the current world record for the largest pumpkin grown by Stefano Cutrupi in Radda, Italy. It weighed a whopping 2,702.9 lbs and 13.9 oz. That’s the weight of the average compact car! Or how about the world record for heaviest marrow (a kind of zucchini), a 5 ft long monster weighing 256 lbs 9.8 oz grown by Vincent Sjodin from South Wales. Consider the world’s largest cabbage weighing 138 lb 4 oz grown by Scott A. Robb from Alaska. Four foot long leeks, onions the size and weight of a bowling ball, a turnip the weight of a nine year-old-child, an orange nearly the size of a basketball, the list goes on.

I takes an equally massive amount of care and attention to grow monster veggies. Growers need to find the right soil mix and provide a space with enough room to grow. The plants need to be fed often, usually with high nitrogen fertilizers. The produce needs to be supported as it swells to comical proportions and protected from pests and damaging changes in weather. Even a light, misty rain can sometimes cause a water-logged Goliath to burst open.

But the best place to start growing massive vegetables is with the right seed. Plants that produce giant vegetables aren’t the usual kind found at the local hardware store. Often these plants are special cultivars bred to make monsters, and they don’t come cheap. Seeds from prize-winning giants are often auctioned off at high sums and some are available for purchase online. If you are willing to pay $295 for a single pumpkin seed or $45 for 4 tomato seeds, you too can try to cultivate mammoth veg.

Just remember to be a good sport an play fair. As with any other sport, giant vegetable growing can have its scandals. In the past, unscrupulous growers have tried to pass off store-bought produce as their own, injected vegetables with water to increase their weight and even painted produce to hide rot.

And if you think these competitive growers may have found a solution to ending world hunger, think again. While some giant vegetables can be cooked and eaten, most of them become too woody and foul tasting to grace any dinner table. Instead, they are usually given to local farmers for animal feed or compost. So at the end of the season, it’s all about aesthetics and the glory of girth!

Brian Rutter, PhD, is the cofounder of Thing in a Pot Productions and a postdoctoral researcher in plant biology at Indiana University. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our “Things About Things – Odd Facts About Plants” and video production tips in your inbox every month!

Works Cited:

Kale, Sirin. “‘We’re like athletes’: the secret lives of giant-vegetable growers.” the guardian.com, 20 October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/oct/20/were-like-athletes-the-secret-lives-of-giant-vegetable-growers.

“The 43 Largest Fruits and Vegetables of All Time With Official Records.” howlongtocook.org, October 2021, https://howlongtocook.org/tips/largest-fruits-vegetables.

“Seeds For Sell.” worldclassgardening.com, October 2021, https://www.worldclassgardening.com/.