Good morning, John.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to make a video about, and so you call your brother and you ask him,
and he reminds you that he’s really stressed out right now, maybe a little bit sad also,
and he just wants a video about humans being joyful and amazing.
So John, here is a video about people being joyful because their fruits and vegetables are amazing.
Humans have been selectively breeding plants since there was agriculture, resulting in some pretty fantastic transformations.
Like check out this ancient ancestor of the carrot.
No, thanks.
And this seedy little green banana ball.
I think I’d rather not, thank you.
And my very favorite agricultural transformation:
This spindly little grass seed here was apparently useful enough that we kept breeding it and breeding it and breeding it until finally we got freaking corn!
What?!
And we remain very good at this.
So good that we just do it for fun now, and we end up with ludicrously large fruits and vegetables.
And I like them, and I love to see the people who are so happy about them.
Let’s start out with the smallest of the big.
The largest apple ever—only 4 pounds!
Also on the list of surprisingly small large things is the largest ever potato: only 8 pounds.
So if you extend that to sweet potatoes, Lebanese farmer Khalil Semhat would have something to say about it with his 25-pound sweet potato.
In 1998, Alaskan farmer and mechanical engineer John Evans grew the largest ever cabbage, over 76 pounds.
And until this year, John Evans was also the record-holder for the world’s largest carrot.
But this year, the title was taken Minnesotan Chris Qualley with his 22-pound carrot that is, frankly, upsetting to look at.
This here is Tim Saint.
He did not grow the largest zucchini, but I did very much like that picture of him holding it.
Likewise, look at this happy woman who has grown the world’s largest pineapple.
It’s Christine McCallum.
Thank you.
And of course, as long as we’re talking about happy people holding their giant vegetables,
here’s Peter Glazebrook holding his world’s largest onion like a baby.
Oh yeah.
Peter Glazebrook and his onion are the cutest thing.
I love them.
Trees and bushes will often have a structural problem growing giant fruits, which is why this world’s largest tomato is being held up by some pantyhose.
But weirdly enough, there’s a variety of lemon called the nine pound lemon tree that grows nine-pound lemons or more, and somehow it manages this just fine.
And there are a few nine pound lemon trees at Epcot in Orlando, where I think the world’s largest lemon was harvested—15 pounds.
Now beating out all this stuff by a lot are the gourds.
Not the band (there is a band called The Gourds).
Melons, squashes, cucumbers are all members of the gourd family, and gourds can grow very big.
The world’s largest watermelon, grown by Chris Kent in Tennessee, weighed in at over 350 pounds.
And remember that the largest thing on this list so far was that 76-pound cabbage.
This is a big watermelon!
But it is nothing compared to the biggest pumpkin.
Now, here’s the situation: The pumpkin is the biggest fruit or vegetable, so if you grow the largest pumpkin, you have grown the largest fruit.
John, I didn’t know this until I started researching this video, but there are giant pumpkin festivals all over the world.
So the fight for who has the largest pumpkin is hard fought, and in 2016, the winner beat the previous record by over 300 pounds!
Mathias Willemijns of Belgium hit it out of the park.
It’s 2600 pounds.
Look at this man! He is a star!
But these festivals tend to be held around October 10th, which I know is an important day for other reasons,
so we don’t know if Mathias’s pumpkin is gonna get beat out in 2017.
John, the World Championship of Pumpkins Weigh-Off is this Sunday.
I don’t know about you, but that’s gonna take over all of the anxiety I have over anything else.
That’s all I’ll be thinking about is this wonderful pumpkin championship.
Nothing else is gonna stress me out.
Just be at peace. You’ll be fine. Your book is great. People will love it.
And John, I will see on Sunday, when I fly to New York City on the very day of the European Championship of Pumpkins Weigh-Off!
Best of luck to all the pumpkin competitors at all of the pumpkin festivals.
I think that you and all of your pumpkins are just great.
In the end, you can turn them into a canoe and there is actually a canoe race.
It’s just pumpkin canoes.
Humans! Wow!