BY ANABELLE de GALE

 Camilo Outerino has been blessed by nature's bounty. He has a 101-inch yuca.

 It took him eight years to grow, but the fruit -- er, tuber of his labor stands close to
 three feet taller than his five-foot, eight-inch frame.

 The 72-year-old retired truck driver dug the mammoth root out of his Hialeah
 garden last week to prove his yuca really was bigger.

 You see, his family thought he had been telling tall tales.

 He was -- eight feet, five inches tall.

 ``He's been saying for years he knew he had a big one. We all brushed him off
 like a fisherman talking about the big fish he caught. `Yeah, right,' we said,'' said
 Barbara Outerino, his daughter-in-law.

 Outerino got tired of the ``wanna-see-my-big-yuca'' jokes and decided to dig the
 thing out of the ground last week. It took three hours.

 ``Ive been growing yuca since I was a little boy in Cuba, and I've never seen
 anything like this before,'' Outerino said.

 Guinness World Records doesn't have a record for a yuca, but the Outerinos have
 already e-mailed them about their rare root.

 It's not entirely a first for Florida, where world-champion produce is common.

 Out of Little Havana this year came the 82-pound yam. West Palm Beach
 squeezed out the competition with its 13-pound, 2-ounce ponderosa lemon three
 years ago. In 1994, the Sunshine State grew a whopper of an okra -- 19 feet, 9
 inches. Jacksonville holds the world's biggest pepper plant title -- 12 feet, 3
 inches.

 Now the Hialeah yuca.

 Yuca soup, yuca with mojo, yuca fritters -- it's enough root to satisfy all cassava
 cravings.

 Too bad it can't be eaten.

 ``Oh, man, that's one megavegetable,'' said Jorge Castellanos, a farmer with
 Cuban Agricola.

 ``Take pictures, pose with it, mount it on the wall, but forget about eating it. You'd
 break your teeth trying to eat that thing. It must be hard as a rock.''

 So what to do with an inedible rock-ripe yuca that's a foot and four inches taller
 than Shaquille O'Neal?

 Simple. Take it to Miami Beach's Yuca restaurant.

 ``Absolutely, I'd love to put an eight-foot yuca on display,'' chef Guillermo Veloso
 said.

 Since not everyone has seen the vegetable before, Veloso said, the restaurant
 already has a display yuca of its own.

 It's 12 inches.

 ``We'll need to make some room,'' Veloso said.