Kids. Couple stumble on 17-pound potato in their garden, perhaps biggest spud in the world.

Kids.

Couple stumble on 17-pound potato in their garden, perhaps biggest spud in the world.

By Sydney Page, The Washington Post.

A New Zealand couple was weeding their garden in late August, when all of a sudden, they spotted a mysterious mass beneath the soil.

"We unearthed this hunk of tuber, and we thought to ourselves, 'what is this? Was it some sort of a strange fungal growth?'" recalled Colin Craig-Brown, 62.

Intrigued, he and his wife, Donna Craig-Brown, 60, got on their hands and knees and started digging.

"We unearthed more and more and more of this thing," Colin said.

"We just kept digging and digging," echoed Donna.

The couple, who live on a small farm in the Waikato region of the country's North Island, quickly realized they needed proper tools for the excavation effort. Their hands simply wouldn't suffice.

Using a large garden fork, they managed to extract the mound, which was "brown and lumpy and deformed," Colin said. "It looks like a big tumor. A great big bumpy gross looking thing."

Eager to identify the strange growth, Colin bravely executed a taste test (which Donna refused to partake in). After swirling the bite around in his mouth, he turned to his wife and confidently said it was a potato!

Indeed, by total accident, the Craig-Browns had cultivated what they now believe is the world's largest potato ever, weighing in at about 17.2 pounds.

The couple decided to share their unexpected finding in a private Facebook post, and "jeepers creepers, we had every man and his dog making funny jokes and comments," Colin said.

They named the potato Dug — "because we dug him up. Plain and simple," said Colin, adding that many media outlets have misspelled the spud's name, calling it "Doug" instead. The couple also made the potato its own small transport cart.

As the story of the vast vegetable started making waves on Facebook, the Craig-Browns' niece called them to propose an idea: "Hey, you know there's a Guinness World Record for the world's biggest potato?" she said, explaining that the current record was just under 11 pounds. "It's some bloke in England. You should go for it because you would beat him hands down."