South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Dream of growing the world’s top potato has been mashed
In August last year, while weeding in a patch of garden behind their home in New Zealand, Colin and Donna Craig-Brown struck gold, or what seemed like the world’s largest potato.
“I had a big hoe in my hand, and it went, ‘clonk,’ ” said Colin Craig-Brown, speaking by phone Thursday from his farm near Hamilton, New Zealand.
Then, he said: “I got a great big four-pronged garden fork and laid into it. ... I thrust my foot deep into the earth, dragged this thing out. ... It was the size of a rubbish bin lid.”
They called it Doug. Doug, spelled Dug in some news reports, was as bronze and as burly as any Thanksgiving turkey and weighed 17.4 pounds. It came seemingly out of nowhere, and to the couple, it looked, tasted and felt very much like a big potato. (They cut off and ate a small piece of it — raw.)
The discovery made its way into the news media, and with subsequent weigh-ins, excitement grew. After friends and family suggested the protuberance might be a contender for the Guinness World Records, the couple submitted an application for “the world’s heaviest potato” and waited.
The couple had not previously grown potatoes, meaning Doug would have had to have been selfseeded. It was substantially larger than the world’s heaviest known potato, which weighed in at 11 pounds and was unearthed in 2010 in Britain.
As the couple waited for word from Guinness, doubts began to creep in. To some in the trade, the photos of Doug suggested that, while impressive, it wasn’t quite a potato.
Then, an email from Guinness landed in Colin Craig-Brown’s inbox last week. A slice of the growth had been submitted for DNA testing, and the results confirmed that Doug was not a potato at all.
“The tuber of a type of gourd,” a spokesman for the organization wrote, adding, “For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”
A tuber can be any kind of swollen underground stem — including a potato.
Gourds, which include pumpkins and cucumbers, are entirely unrelated plants.
Chris Claridge, a horticulturist and the chief executive of the industry group Potatoes New Zealand, which assisted in the DNA testing, described the growth as a kind of scar tissue on a wound, similar to the lumps sometimes seen on trees after a branch is removed.
“It could have had an infection, it could have had a disease, it could have just formed and grown as an accident of nature,” he said. “But it’s not even the same family as the potato.”
For Craig-Brown, the result was disappointing. But how it got in his garden was also a puzzle that kept him awake at night.
And then, a possible breakthrough could help to explain.
“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?”