Turn left at the chickens. If you hit the ponies you’ve gone too far. (Please don’t hit the ponies.)

When you gaze into the eyes of the carved root vegetable that looks like a wizened Muppet, a murmur of “holy geez, holy cow, look at that thing,” will signal your arrival at the land of the weird and the large: the giant vegetable competition at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair.

The 1,000-pound pumpkins bring the crowds to the annual fair held at Exhibition Place, but the buzz this year belongs to the 53.4-pound beet, believed to be a world record. (At the Royal, weights are still recorded in imperial measurements.)

“She’s my baby,” Joanne Borcsok said Saturday, holding what looked like a miniature mountain range in her lap.

After carefully watering, fertilizing and occasionally singing to her crop, Borcsok harvested 15 giant beets two days ago. She poked them to weed out the rotten ones, then chose the biggest ones to haul to Toronto from her King Township farm. She made nine trips, ferrying veggies of all sizes, along with the regular onions and carrots she grows.

Last year, the 56-year-old had a 62.2-pound beetroot, but it was “kind of disqualified” as a world record because it wasn’t the right colour on the inside. It was a “fodder beet” for the cows, she said.

“This is a true red beet,” she said with excitement.

“What taste would that have?” asked a man drawn into the beet’s orbit.

“Probably hard as a rock,” Borcsok said, laughing.

“How long would it have taken to grow that thing?” the man asked, turning the conversation into the beet’s first media scrum.

“I started inside the house in February,” Borcsok answered.

The man stopped his questioning briefly to promote the beet. “This is a world record here!” he yelled to a friend walking by. “You don’t walk by a world record!”

Peter Hohenadel, the Royal’s director of agriculture, said his first indication of the apparent world record came when “Joanne hugged me.”

Hohenadel said that the growing of giant vegetables is a subculture within a subculture, involving a mix of special genetics and cultivation, drip irrigation and folklore. Most participants belong to the Giant Vegetable Growers of Ontario, a non-profit group “dedicated to the growing of giant vegetables for the purpose of competition, display, sales and enjoyment,” according to the group’s website.

The pursuit is well-known for its competitive spirit, even though it doesn’t come with the same kind of lucrative benefits as other agricultural pursuits.

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“If someone has a Grand Champion Hereford cow, all their herd is worth more money,” Hohenadel said. “Joanne gets zero. I think the prize is like $10 or $15 for having the biggest vegetable. This is truly a labour of love; they’re doing it for pride and pride alone.”

Chris Lyons, a truck driver from Scarborough, drives north of Lindsay every weekend to tend his crop of large oddities growing on the farm of Jane and Phil Hunt.

“I just love doing it,” Lyons said. “I like to look for the best genetics I can.”

He was surprised that his prizewinning carrot only weighed 5.6 pounds. It had been growing in a tube since January, and was transplanted to a field after the risk of frost ended.

“It felt heavier than that,” Lyons said, looking at the carrot’s twisted body. “I did have a larger one. I picked them last weekend but a few of them rotted out.”

His 53.4-pound rutabaga and 1,398.6-pound pumpkin also took top spots at the Royal. He had a heavier pumpkin with a nicer shape, but it would have been a 1,500-pound hassle to move it. The one he brought is a bit sunken on the top but it was already in the trailer.

He said he did well on the fair circuit this year. It helped that there was no frost in September.

“The pumpkin is the lion’s share of the money,” he said.

The timing for the Royal is “kind of awkward,” because some of the crops have been out of the field for six weeks, Hohenadel said.

“You can see the pumpkins are starting to collapse. We can’t lift them with a forklift at the end of the fair because they will be more liquid than solid,” he said. “But for 10 days, they look pretty cool.”

By the end of the fair next weekend, the pumpkins will be cut up and the seeds will be saved for next year.

As people continued to walk by, mystified by the kohlrabi — “Is that a cactus?” someone asked — Borcsok left to return to the farm where her husband was busy with the harvest.

Guinness has not yet verified Borcsok’s beet accomplishment, but officials at the fair said that “Joanne appears to have set a new world record.”

Her phone line was busy for a good part of Saturday night.

“Now she’s a star,” said the woman who answered, before passed the receiver to Borcsok, who was still buzzing with the win.