Monday, May 14, 2007

I Never Saw a Purple Carrot

I had never heard of purple carrots until I visited a site based in the UK called the Carrot Museum. These carrots are purple on the outside and orange in the middle. Much to my surprise, it turns out that the original, wild carrots are, in fact, purple. The Dutch had bred carrots to be completely orange to complement the House of Orange, whatever that institution was.

I found seeds for purple carrots at Jung Seeds, a Wisconsin-based mail order company which specializes in organic plant materials. So not only did I order purple carrot seeds, but also white (Edelweiss), red (Swenson Red) and purple (Fredonia) grape plants for the newly built grape arbor in my backyard. After I saw ready-made arbors for $1,000-plus, I decided to jerry-rig my own using two assemble-it-yourself Tuesday Morning $39.95 on-sale trellises and roof them with a spare piece of raw lattice. Voila! Supposedly, grapes take about three years to go into full production. Here goes nothing!

Read my poem about Volcanic Vegetables: Carrots at the Carrot Museum! ◦
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2 comments:

carrotmuseum said...

Nice piece Cynth, thanks for the plug. You forgot to buy yellow varieties!!. Oops and the House of Orange is on my history pages!

Daphne said...

I love your Volcanic Vegetables poem and posted it on my blog, with attribution. I also used it for a Poetry in Place activity, which you can read about here: http://notarealplace.blogspot.com/2007/11/poetry-in-place.html
Please let me know if you have any objections.
Thank you!!