Having just got in from chopping wood in the forest (hence the wild woman look complete with twigs and moss in the hair), I decided to pick some vegetables from the garden to make a good lumberjack stew, and pulled up this beauty.
For those who are interested, this is a Yellowstone carrot (available from West Coast Seeds), and the catalog description reads “long, tapered, pale yellow roots look sensational on the plate and grow to the size of parsnips!“. Having had little success with growing parsnips in Prince Rupert, where a good sized parsnip was hardly thicker than my thumb, this description meant little to me, until now. Holy smoke, these suckers are huge! I rather expected this carrot to be tough and woody, but it was actually quite tender and easy to cut, in spite of being 3+ inches in diameter. The flavor is not as sweet as baby carrots, but still a nice subtle flavor that is good in stews, and as suggested in the catalog, I suspect they will roast well.
That is a huge one. I grow scarlet nantes and they get big around but stay short. I need that because my floating garden soil is only about 10 inches deep (can’t seem to get a handle on metric yet). – Margy
I was surprised that this one grew so large – it is over 12″ long – as our soil is still full of roots and rocks, and needs a lot of work yet. We also grew some Scarlet Nantes, and they got to be 9-10″ long. Maybe we just have “long carrot” soil (but I’m not complaining).