Then, an e-mail from Guinness landed in Mr. Craig-Brown’s inbox final week. A slice of the expansion had been submitted for DNA testing, and the outcomes confirmed the doubters’ suspicions:
Doug was not a potato in any respect.
“Sadly the specimen just isn’t a potato and is, in actual fact, the tuber of a kind of gourd,” a spokesman for the group wrote, including, “For that reason we do sadly must disqualify the applying.”
To these with out inexperienced thumbs, “tuber of a kind of gourd” is likely to be frustratingly indirect wording. A tuber may be any type of swollen underground stem — together with a potato. Gourds, which embrace pumpkins, marrows and cucumbers, are fully unrelated crops.
So what’s Doug actually, the place did it come from, and why did it present up within the backyard close to Hamilton, a metropolis in New Zealand’s North Island? No clear solutions have emerged.
Chris Claridge, a horticulturist and the chief government of the trade group Potatoes New Zealand, which assisted within the DNA testing, described the expansion as a type of scar tissue on a wound, just like the lumps generally seen on timber after a department is eliminated.
“It may have had an an infection, it may have had a illness, it may have simply shaped and grown as an accident of nature,” he mentioned. “However it’s not even the identical household because the potato.”
He added: “Put it this fashion: We’re good at rising potatoes in New Zealand, however we’re not that good.”
For Mr. Craig-Brown, the end result was disappointing. It was additionally a puzzle that saved him awake at evening.