Tom Reid and Molly Johnson are keen gardeners who turned up at their rented plot in Pialligo to do a shoot for the Canberra Times' Food and Wine magazine.

Mr Reid was asked to pull up some vegetables for the photo and accidentally unearthed this amusingly oversized carrot.

In an exclusive carrot-related interview, Molly Johnson told the Canberra Times it was probably the biggest carrot the couple had harvested so far.

"[Columnist Susan Parsons] just said 'pull out a carrot so we can take a picture,' and that was the one that Tom picked," she said, with a laugh. "It was just a larger one than we expected."

This isn't the first amusingly large vegetable spotted in the capital - in recent weeks Canberra man Antonio D'Ambrosio unearthed a 4kg mushroom in Deakin which he reckoned was enough for 25 pizzas.

Ms Johnson and Mr Reid weren't trying to break any local vegetable records.

Ms Johnson reckons they just planted too many carrots in that garden bed and didn't manage to pick and eat all of them, allowing this large tuber to keep growing, unnoticed.

They do plan to eat the giant carrot but it won't be turned into an epic pile of carrot sticks.

"I imagine that it'll be good in a stew or a soup as opposed to a salad," Ms Johnson said.

Ms Johnson and Mr Reid live in an apartment in the city but rent the plot in Pialligo to grow their own vegetables.

They'll be featured in Susan Parsons' gardening column Kitchen Garden, about foodies who grow their own fruit and veg, in the Food and Wine magazine on Wednesday.