Life’s full of surprises – but none quite as sweet as the giant kūmara unearthed at Carmel Retirement Village in Ohauiti by Ted Schischka.
“I put the spade in the garden and there was the bl**dy big thing in the ground,” Schischka said.
After digging up the 2.68kg tuber, he took it to The Fresh Market in Gate Pā to weigh it.
The giant kūmara weighs 2.68kg.
Schischka usually grows cauliflower and broccoli, but decided to give kūmara a go after a friend dropped off some slips last December. Beyond planting them, he left them to their own devices.
“We didn’t know anything about kūmara, so we just let them do their own thing.”
The crop produced only a few kūmara. Later, Schischka planted potatoes over the same plot and covered them with frost cloth for winter.
On June 26, while clearing out the garden, he got more than he expected.
“We got some little ones [kūmara], then we started getting a few bigger ones, and then that massive kūmara. We got a nice feed out of it.”
Not far away in Te Puna, Maurice Gargan had a similar surprise waiting in his soil – a 2.96kg kūmara he never even planted.
“I did not put any kūmara in, but there must have been a few wild ones left over,” Gargan said.
After returning from a trip to the South Island, Gargan noticed unexpected kūmara growth and decided to dig them up.
“I started digging, and had to dig even more – then it came loose like a giant tooth.”
The 2.96kg kūmara was discovered in a small garden bed measuring just 2m x 1.2m/
“It is in perfect condition,” Gargan said.
With the giant kūmara still intact, the yield from just three or four plants netted Gargan 22kg of food.
Two backyard giants, two different gardens, but both gardeners have one common plan in mind: to use their giant kūmara for fries.
The largest kūmara in both the Bay of Plenty and Aotearoa weighed 4.6kg and belongs to Ōtūmoetai man Jeremy Thompson, as reported by The Weekend Sun in 2020.
The world record for the largest sweet potato is 37kg. It was discovered by Manuel Pérez Pérez in Güime, Lanzarote, Spain, on March 8, 2004, according to Guinness World Records.