When retired Aberdeenshire farmer and keen gardener Arthur Nicol went to pull up a carrot to go with is Sunday lunch, out came a monster.
Arthur, 90, couldn’t believe the size of it.
The mammoth root vegetable was much too heavy for his kitchen scales.
His granddaughter, Steph, who loves nearby, popped round with something better equipped to weigh the gargantuan carrot.
It tipped her scales at 4lb 10.6oz, measuring 1ft in length with a circumference of 19 inches at its widest point.
Arthur still helps on the farm
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Arthur, who still helps out on the family farm.
He is often spotted out in his tractor ploughing fields.
The 400-acre mixed farm at Westerord Skene, near Westhill, was previously run by Arthur and his late wife, Ella.
It is now owned and run by Steph’s parents, Derek and Lynn Nicol.
Steph, a director at family-owned civil engineering firm Nicol of Skene, described her green-fingered grandad as an “absolutely fantastic” gardener.
As well as carrots, he grows strawberries, turnips, cabbages, and other fruit and veg.
“All my carrots are large for some reason but this is the biggest I’ve ever seen,” he said.
The sheer size of it won it a swift reprieve from any immediate plans to eat it.
“I didn’t have the heart to cut it up and cook it,” he explained.
But Arthur’s initial reluctance to devour the massive carrot has since given way to a more pragmatic approach.
Steph said: “He’s cut it up and I believe some went to his friends to bulk up their dog food. The rest went in soup.”
Arthur said he had no idea why his carrots were generally bigger than average.
But then he offered a possible reason – he covers them in cow dung to help them grow.
Arthur is, naturally, proud of his biggest carrot but it falls well short of the world record holders.
The world’s heaviest and longest carrots
Christopher Qualley, of Otsego, Minnesota, in the US, grew the heaviest carrot, weighing in at a whopping 22.44lb, in 2017.
“I think everyone that grows giant fruits and veggies has a dream in the back of their mind to set a world record,” Christopher told Guinness World Records.
He added: “I was lucky enough to have a dream come true.”
UK grower Joe Atherton holds the record for the world’s longest carrot. His 20ft 5.86” pride and joy was verified at the National Giant Vegetables Championship, in Malvern, in September 2016.
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