World Record Garden Produce

I picked the very first ripe tomato from my garden yesterday. It wasn't even big enough to cover a sandwich with a slice. There are much larger green tomatoes that will, whenever they ripen. But they are all small potatoes (so to speak) compared to the monsters that some serious gardeners grow. I'm talking about the biggest vegetables ever.

Prolific Cabbage Patch

The growing season is short in Alaska, so vegetables must grow as fast as they can. Steve Hubacek worked for 14 years to get his cabbages to grow very fast -and it worked. He entered a 125-pound cabbage in the "green cabbage" category at the Alaska State Fair in 2009, and not only won, but set a world record for the biggest cabbage. Then two days later, he brought out the big guns, er cabbage. The vegetable he called "The Beast" was entered in the annual Giant Cabbage Weigh-Off and recorded at 127 pounds, which broke his own record. Hubacek said the biggest cabbages don't taste so good, so the Beast was eventually made into compost to feed this year's crop.

Deep Roots

The world's longest carrot measured over 19 feet! Gardener Joe Atherton of Nottinghamshire, England, grows his carrots in plastic tubes, filled with a compost mix, set at a 45 degree angle, with watering holes placed at precise spots for maximum nutrition and drainage. One of his many tubes produced the record-setting root in 2007, after 14 months of growth.

When Life Gives you Lemons

In 2003, Aharon Shemoel grew a lemon that weighed 11 pounds, 9.7 ounces in his orchard at Kefar Zeitim, Israel. It appears to be a conjoined twin.

What a Melon!

The Lloyd Bright family grew a watermelon in 2005 that weighed 268.8 pounds, enough to feed an entire reunion. The Bright farm of Hope, Arkansas had already set two previous records for watermelons.

Digging Taters

The Year of the Potato was celebrated in 2008, so it was only appropriate that a record would be set. Khalil Semhat, a farmer in Tyre, Labanon dug up a potato that required help from a friend just to get it out of the ground. The huge tuber weighed 24.9 pounds! However, there were questions raised as to whether this was a potato or a sweet potato. Sweet potatoes grow much larger, and the world record sweet potato was an 81 pounder grown by Manuel Pérez Pérez of Spain in 2004.

The Guinness folks determined that the Lebanese potato was a sweet potato, and did not break the potato record, which had been held for ten years previously by Nigel Kermode. Kermode grew a 7 pound, 13 ounce spud on the Isle on Man in 1998.

The Great Pumpkin

The world record for the biggest pumpkin is broken almost every year as gardeners compete in contests all over. The current record is held by high school math teacher Christy Harp, who brought a 1,725 pound monster pumpkin to the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers annual weigh-off in October of 2009.

Disney's "Tomato Tree"

A tomato vine growing in a greenhouse at The Land pavilion at Epcot Center produces up to 32,000 tomatoes a year! The tomatoes aren't all that big, but the combined weight of that many is over a thousand pounds. Disney agricultural scientist Yong Huang found the tomato variety in a laboratory in China and brought back the seeds to Florida. The huge vine has an extensive support matrix to allow it room to grow and spread and the enclosed greenhouse provides sunlight and temperature control for continuous growth. And Disney isn't telling the rest of the "tree's" secrets.

Tomato in the Cantaloupes

Gordon Graham experimented with his tomato plants in 1986. He figured a really big vine grown before the fruit set would be advantageous for larger fruit. One of Graham's vines grew to almost 14 feet when a storm blew it off its supports and into the cantaloupe patch. At that point, the gardener gave up on the vine and turned his attention to other plants. But the huge vine kept growing, more than tripling in length. Hidden among the cantaloupes, one tomato grew unnoticed until it reached gigantic proportions. Graham eventually saw the big tomato, which weighed seven pounds, 12 ounces when it was finally picked -a world record tomato!

The tomato was ultimately sliced into 21 sandwich slabs and eaten. The Miracle Gro company had a replica made with the same dimensions as the original and presented it to Graham as a record of the... record. Miracle Gro offers a cash prize to anyone growing a bigger tomato, but no one has been able to beat Graham's record yet.

With the new crops coming in and fair season underway, some of these records may be broken soon..