Kevin’s marrow is as heavy as a baby hippo (it’s arriving on the back of a tractor), and Ian’s pumpkin makes a nice chair (six humans are hoisting it onto a scale). Meanwhile, a prize-winning cabbage takes up most of a park bench, freaking out a toddler.
The U.S. produces impressively swollen pumpkins, there is a world-record marrow in the Netherlands, and strong competition from Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. But the culture of growing giant vegetables to show off is decidedly British. In the Wallace and Gromit movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a village’s annual giant-veg competition comes under threat from the titular beast, and the citizens take it very seriously. In towns up and down the UK, during September and October, you can find giant-vegetable competitions wherever cell phone service gets spotty. The prizes are never as good as Gromit’s golden carrot (spoiler!), yet the competition is fierce, the anticipation high, and the parsnips twisted as all hell. (The thing to know about giant vegetables is that they are not just big; they are unrecognizable. There is the mangled hell of a giant parsnip, writhing and twisting on itself, and there is the shapely magnificence of a giant onion, shrouded in layer upon layer of golden skin.)
