FORT WAYNE, Ind. – An Indiana man now holds the world record again for growing a sunflower more than three times the standard height of a basketball rim.

The sunflower raised by Alex Babich measured 35 feet, 9 inches, shattering the previous Guinness Book of World Records mark from 2016 by more than 5 feet.

He told ABC’s Good Morning America being a world record holder for raising the tallest sunflower is “as good as it comes for an extreme grower.”

Stephen Goodwin, a professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University, said, “That’s quite an achievement. Pretty amazing.”

The 47-year-old Babich, of Fort Wayne, was previously the U.S. record holder for growing a sunflower that reached just over 26 feet tall in 2023, breaking his previous U.S. record by 11 inches.

He credits things like seed genetics for achieving such heights.

Goodwin said he did not know how much taller a sunflower could grow through genetics and other factors, but feels a ceiling will be reached at some point.

“What that limit would be, I have no idea. He’s definitely pushing it,” he said.

Last year, Babich had 10 sunflowers reach slightly more than 20 feet tall, but none of them were close to his previous heights.

Disappointed, “I went back to the drawing board and drew up a plan for this season,” said Babich, when quoted in a recently published Guinness Book of World Records article on his achievement.

His strategy included the use of a seed from a sunflower topping 28 feet in height last year in Germany.

His sunflower, named “Clover,” was planted in late April and for a while grew up to 10 inches a day.

He grows his sunflowers inside a wooden scaffolding type structure he built in his backyard to support the heads and promote extension of the plants as they’re growing. The sunflowers are fastened to metal rods within the structure that he climbs to take care of the plants once they’re beyond his reach from the ground.

This year, his world record-breaking sunflower grew so fast that Babich added an extension to make his structure taller to prevent the possibility of the head from drooping and the top of the plant getting blown over by strong winds.

Babich wasn’t into gardening much until just over a decade ago when he planted three tomato plants and three butternut squash plants to simply show his daughter how to grow produce.

Five years later, he planted his first sunflower after learning it was the national flower of his native Ukraine, where he and his family lived until migrating to Fort Wayne when he was 14.

The height of his sunflowers rose each year from 13 feet to 15 feet and 19 feet before setting the U.S. record for the first time the following year.

Babich also credited a mulch he developed from a compost of leaves, grass and other materials such as mushrooms for the height of his sunflowers, along with giving them daily attention.

Now that he’s broken the world record, seeds of doubt have been sewn on his future of raising gigantic sunflowers given the amount of work and more of a balance he prefers to have with his job schedule.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records article, his wife, Nanette, prayed for him to break the record this year so he could take a year off from competitive growing so they could go camping more during the summer.

He promised to do just that but now seems to be having second thoughts.

“I’m usually a man of my word but the kids have been asking me a lot lately will I grow next season? I told them they’d have to talk to mom, but I would love one more solid growing season with Clover’s seeds before I take a break,” he said.

On average, sunflowers reach anywhere from 2 to 12 feet in height but some variations can exceed 15 feet.

Eventually, Goodwin said he believes Babich and others trying to break the mark could run out of the type of genes needed in their seeds for sunflowers to grow even taller.

“You can get to a point where you got all of the best gene combinations in there.  There’s just no more variations to select from depending on how many genes are involved and all of that,” he said.