What a whopper! Can you beat 232g feijoa?

This 232g feijoa, grown by Hastings woman Zara Monrad, is her biggest this season. Photo / Duncan Brown

The family, friends and sheep of a Hastings couple are lucky enough to never be in short supply of large feijoas.

The season is set to be another bumper one and Hawke's Bay Today is on the hunt for the biggest joeys in the Bay.

Those growing on Zara Monrad's Pakowhai property are competing for the title, although she had not heard about the competition until she read an article in Hawke's Bay Today about a 150g feijoa.

"When I saw it I said, 150g? That's what we feed our sheep," she said.

Luckily for Ms Monrad, the four trees in her yard produce large feijoas every year but one from this season weighing 232g may be one of the biggest.

When asked the secret to her feijoa-growing success, Ms Monrad said it was "just luck".

She and her partner had not expected many to grow this year, because they had pruned their trees just before the season began in March.

"The trees had elongated because there was a lot of fruit in them, we thought it was going to be crap this year," she said.

"We thought we might have a bumper year next year."

Instead, Ms Monrad is crediting the 232g feijoa, and the other many sizeable fruit, with the prune and some sheep manure that was placed around the trees. Ms Monrad said they would have to wait until next year to see if this would make a real difference.

With numerous feijoa at their fingertips, Ms Monrad said: "You've got to have feijoa crumble, feijoa icecream ... we eat a lot of them and give a lot away to friends and family."

Everything which is too small is fed to the sheep, which Ms Monrad said meant "the fruit is going to good use, rather than just rotting on the ground".

Last year Havelock North man Roger Corbett's 316g feijoa went viral on social media, and was viewed almost 120,000 times on Facebook.

Although Mr Corbett's feijoas impressed, they were dwarfed in comparison to Heather Smith's.

The Havelock North farmer produced fruit tipping the scales at an astonishing 385g.

The season for feijoas generally runs from March to late June.