By Tim Binnall
An enormous strawberry cultivated by a farmer in Israel has been declared the heaviest ever grown with a staggering weight of 10 ounces. The monstrous-looking fruit reportedly sports a jaw-dropping circumference of 13 inches and is an astounding seven inches long. Produced by farmer Chahi Ariel, the strawberry's prodigious size is credited to an inordinately cold winter in Israel last year, which allowed for a longer period of time for the fruit to grow before it ultimately ripened.
In a testament to the rigors of attaining an official world record, the farmer says that the fruit was actually picked sometime last year and that, not unlike Dug the prospective world's largest potato, the strawberry has kept frozen until the title was finally confirmed by Guinness last week. "When we heard, it was an amazing feeling. I jumped in the car, laughed and sang," Ariel recalled, "we've been waiting for this for a long time."
The record-breaking fruit is a special strain, dubbed Ilan, that was created by researchers from the Volcani Institute in Israel in an effort to grow larger strawberries. In this instance, it would seem that their work was wildly successful as Ariel's title holder is a whopping five times the size of an average berry. It also smashes the previous record for heaviest strawberry which was set in 2015 by a sizeable specimen grown n Japan that weighed a whopping 8.8 ounces.