The freakishly big tomato was nurtured by a grower in Minnesota, US

Sep 10, 2014 19:55 GMT  ·  By

They say that we should eat at least five servings of fruit and veggies each and every day. Well, were one to gulp down the monstrous tomato pictured next to this article, they would surely meet their healthy food quota for their entire life.

The fruit, believed to be the heaviest tomato ever to grow in a garden, tips the scale at a whopping 8.41 pounds (approximately 3.81 kilograms). Size-wise, it's comparable to a human head.

How does a tomato grow this big?

In case anyone was wondering, this freakishly big fruit ended up weighing this much thanks to all the love and attention grower Dan MacCoy from Minnesota, US, showered it in.

Granted, fertilizers and a pair of pantyhose that served to support its weight were also involved, but, at the end of the day, good old TLC made all the difference. Or so Dan MacCoy likes to think.

The fruit was grown from special seeds known as Big Zac. As explained by the Minnesota grower, tomato plants that form from such seeds tend to birth fruits that, rather than going each their separate way, fuse together and become one.

The hidden agenda

Apparently, Dan MacCoy didn't invest time and money in growing this tomato for his entertainment alone. He became interested in one such project after fertilizer company Miracle-Gro offered a $100,000 (€77,536) prize to whoever managed to grow the heaviest such fruit ever.

Before turning this attention to tomatoes, the Minnesota grower tried his luck at nurturing a record-breaking pumpkin. When he realized that his fingers were not the right kind of green to successfully complete such a project, he switched to tomato plants.

A new world record

According to the Star Tribune, Guinness World Records currently considers a 7.75-pound (3.5-kilogram) tomato harvested in 1986 by Gordon Graham from Oklahoma, US, to be the heaviest fruit of this kind to have ever been grown anywhere in the world.

Since Dan MacCoy's tomato packs considerably more juiciness, chances are that it is only a matter of time until this grower and his seriously oversized fruit become the new world record holders. The two will earn this title if nobody presents an even bigger tomato by November 1.

The tomato's demise

The bad news is that, shortly after the monstrous tomato was weighed on the deli scale at a grocery store in the city of Ely in Minnesota, grower Dan MacCoy chopped it and collected its seeds. The rest of the tomato, on the other hand, was turned into compost.

Dan MacCoy estimated that the seeds he collected from this fruit are worth somewhere around $16,000 (€12,405). He says that he is thinking about either donating them to other competitive growers or auctioning them off and offering the money to non-profit organization Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which deals with world-record fruit growing.