Want some sweet potato casserole, baked sweet potato or even some sweet potato fries to go with that Thanksgiving turkey?

Bowling Green residents Jennifer and Spencer Anderson could hook you up with one tuber from their backyard garden, with enough left over for a candied dessert dish, if it hadn’t already been donated for scientific research.

The couple reaped more than they sowed this fall when they dug up one of the root vegetables. And dug. And dug.

“It kept getting bigger and bigger as I dug,” said Spencer Anderson, who called what turned out to be a record-setting sweet potato “disturbingly large.”

A little bigger than a basketball and looking like some sort of mutated plant from a bad science fiction movie, the sweet potato got an official weighing from Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles on Oct. 26 and tipped the scales at 19.17 pounds.

Quarles said the Andersons’ potato was indeed sweet. He declared it the largest sweet potato the Kentucky Department of Agriculture has ever verified.

To put the potato in perspective, the average sweet potato weighs just a bit more than a quarter of a pound. Though only a fraction the size of the 81-pounder grown in Spain in 2004 and still listed as the world’s largest, the Andersons’ tubular tuber can’t take a backseat to anyone in the Bluegrass state.

“I could’ve made a giant sweet potato pie,” quipped Jennifer Anderson.

Not bad for a couple of hobby farmers. The Andersons live on Smallhouse Road and have a 3,000-square-foot garden where they grow peppers, zucchini, cucumbers and the occasional monster sweet potato.

“We’ve been gardening for about 10 years,” said Jennifer. “We usually grow enough to share with friends and neighbors.”

This year’s crop was good, but Jennifer said: “The other sweet potatoes were nowhere near that size. Most were pretty small in comparison. That one seemed to take in all the energy.”

Was it irradiated or at least doused with some experimental fertilizer? Not a chance, said Jennifer.

“We always get a truckload of manure compost from the Western Kentucky University farm,” she said. “And we do our own composting. We try to keep it as organic as possible.”

Rather than attempt to consume the record-setting root vegetable, the Andersons decided to donate it to the WKU agriculture department.

“They’ll figure out what to do with it,” Jennifer said. “I don’t think they’ve ever seen anything quite like it, so they will be able to study it.”