Giant Kohlrabi on KMOT-TV North Dakota's NBC News Leader

Giant Kohlrabi | Video

10/31/2009

When harvest season rolls around you sometimes hear stories of larger than average produce growing.

Today, we have one of those stories, and it deals with a vegetable that may not be widely known.

"It can`t quite feed a country, maybe a small town, maybe a small town of Menoken," Bill Doll laughs.

Doll may have one of the largest Kohlrabis around. Bill and his wife Vira live in Bismarck and say their Kohlrabi weighs 40 pounds.

"I estimated it weighed about 36 pounds when I carried it in. I brought it up on a wheelbarrel, put it on a scale, and it weighed 40 pounds without the leaves," says Bill.

He says it`s one giant Kohrabi considering most would be content with a three-pounder. What is a Kohlrabi? It`s a vegetable, which has characteristics of both a turnip and cabbage. In German, Kohl means cabbage, and rabi means turnip. The Doll`s say it tastes like the core of a cabbage.

"You peel it, you can dice it, boil it, butter it, cream sauce, cheese sauce, anything, eat it raw, it`s good," says Vira.

But how in the world did they get it to be this big? He says it`s nature. He doesn`t use plant steroids or any other cheating techniques, he just plants it and lets it do it`s thing. Oh, and if 40 pounds is too big, you can settle for his 36 pounder.

Their mission is to find out if this giant Kohlrabi is a record-holder. After they get it weighed and determined to be or not to be a record, they say they`re going to chop it up and give it away, because they say 40 pounds of Kohlrabi is too much for two people.

The Doll`s say they`re going for bigger and better next year, and they might even baby the plant from start to finish to see how big they can get it to grow. They also grew a two-pound carrot in their garden this year.

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