A giant, wonky and ugly vegetable that you’ll never find at the supermarket is taking over allotments and back gardens, winning prizes at village shows and prompting social media growalongs – and now even has its own festival.
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The mangelwurzel, or mangold, looks like a misshapen giant beetroot on steroids – or a mandrake from Harry Potter. You may think you haven’t heard of it, but Worzel Gummidge, the book and TV scarecrow, had a mangelwurzel as one of his three interchangeable heads and the Wurzels, the ‘Scrumpy and Western’ band from Somerset, are named after the vegetable.
Somewhere between a beetroot and a sugar beet, the mangelwurzel was grown as a crop in Britain for centuries. But it fell out of favour and more recently has only been mostly grown as animal fodder.
That all changed when seed company She Grows Veg started selling mangelwurzel seeds two years ago. “It’s been manglewurzel fever,” says CCO & co-founder, Lucy Hutchings. “We made one video about it for Instagram, where I explained what it was, what it tasted like and what to do with it, and it went absolutely crazy. The video got around three million views, and people are still watching it. For the last two years it has been our bestselling seed, outselling everything else four times over."
She says: “Initally there’s that childlike excitement of, ‘oh my God, this is absolutely huge and I grew it from a tiny seed’. But once people have grown it, they're pleasantly surprised by what it's like to eat. The flavour is really great – it tastes like beetroot, but less earthy. Once people have grown it for the novelty and to be part of the trend, they stick with it just because actually it's a brilliant vegetable.”
So what can you do with a mangelwurzel? “You can do anything with it that you would do with a large root vegetable, like a swede or a celeriac,” explains Lucy. “Plus you get a leaf harvest from it, so you can treat it like chard. A mangelwurzel can get pretty weighty, but the best time to eat it is when it has reached human head size, because then it's nice and tender. But you can let them get really big – people ferment them and make wine from them. We've had people send us their mangelwurzel wine. It's punchy, I can tell you.”
The mangelwurzel is also very easy to grow. “It's got a huge sowing window [February to August] and it swells above the ground, so you can see when it's ready. You also can leave it in ground over winter – it was originally called the ‘scarcity root’ because it gave food when nothing else really did. It’s as foolproof as a vegetable can be. Just give a little bit more space between the plants because they're going to get very large.”
It’s getting too late to grow your own mangelwurzel this year, but if your curiosity has been piqued, head to Somerset. The inaugural Great Polden Hills Mangelwurzel Day 2026 takes place in Edington on 20 September, with awards including heaviest, longest, biggest girth, gnarliest, most vibrant colour – and the one that looks most like Donald Trump.
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Organiser Beverley Finnegan says the festival has grown almost as fast as a mangelwurzel. “I grew maybe a dozen last year – I just threw the seeds in the ground and they sprouted. I was pleasantly surprised by the taste and ate them all. I run the admin on a local Facebook group, so I put a callout saying, ‘how about a little local competition for mangelwurzel growing?’ and the response was phenomenal.”
Come spring, Beverley had a constant stream of people at her door, coming to collect seeds. “I thought I'd hire the local village hall so we could all get together for a couple of hours at the end of the season and compare our manglewurzels. But I realised that our local village hall was going to be too small.”
The festival is now in a larger village hall nearby and will be sponsored by She Grows Veg, with entries judged by Lucy Hutchings and local no-dig expert Charles Dowding. There will be live music, food and drink, and a revival of the West Country tradition of manglewurzel hurling. “There's a whole local crochet team that are busy crocheting manglewurzels. It's gone insane,” says Beverley. “We have a mangelwurzel committee. I love saying that.”
Beverley thinks the popularity of the veg is down to its name. “It’s a funny word and it's really nice to say. And then you look at the vegetable itself and you think, oh, that's weird and wacky. Every supermarket seems to have the same vegetables, and this is different. If you let them grow, they will reach the size of, I've been told, a small toddler, but the younger they are, they're sweeter and more tender to eat.” The ones grown for competition will have been grown for around six months – Beverley is thinking of putting a crate at the exit for growers to donate any leftovers for animal fodder.
“It's great that the festival's happening in Somerset, where they’ve traditionally been grown – and mangold hurling is a thing there,” says Lucy. “Viral trends often flare up and die out, but we’re now in year two and festivals are starting. The mangelwurzel has got longevity because it's a great vegetable. It's lovely to see something go from so forgotten to so loved.”
