Yesterday's long overdue chore was to pull up the remaining carrots so we could plant raven zucchini (it is supposed to grow upwards!), yellow snap peas, green snap peas, and even more carrots. I had to stop pulling carrots after the first few because they were scaring me. "Unspeakable horror of a carrot" is what we called the freaky ones.
We did determine that the Nantes carrots were the ones subject to mutation. One person thinks that a nematode is the culprit. Another thinks our proximity to the Lawrence Berkeley Labs produces suspect carrots. I just call them organic and leave it at that.
Not every carrot we grow is a freak show. The chubby carrots are the ones we replanted: red core Royal Chantenay. You've never tasted a carrot so sweet!
The mutant carrots will be diced and added to some tomato sauce. All chopped up, they pretty and the ugly carrots look and taste the same. The boy also wants me to make him some carrot pickles, and I have the twisted idea of putting a whole mutant carrot into a jar, covering it with brine, and using it as a centerpiece. I could line up a row of mutant carrot pickles like the specimen jars we saw at a sketchy science museum in Vietnam! Yeah, maybe I'll do that.
