One Massive Daucus Carota Sativus

Check out what our little garden grew! 

I thought our garden needed to be fully re-harvested.  So, when I went to pull the weeks and till the ground, I was very surprised to find this gnarly beast (along with lettuce and beets).

It was NOT fun pulling this big daddy out of the ground.  I had to break it into 3 pieces to get it out.  Our family can totally chow down on some carrots!  In fact, we go through carrots and oranges more than any other grocery item.  A single roll of toilet paper will last longer in our house than a bag of carrots or oranges.  True fact!

Click here for the incredible health benefits that carrots provide.

The origin of the cultivated carrot is clearly acknowledged to be purple and in the Afghanistan region mainly because it was known to exist there well before reliable literature references or paintings gave evidence of Western carotene carrots. It is thought the carotene carrot was domesticated in the regions around Turkey.

The purple carrot spread into the Mediterranean in the 10th century where it is thought a yellow mutant appeared. The purple and yellow carrots both gradually spread into Europe in subsequent centuries. It is considered that the white carrot is also a mutant of yellow varieties.

Orange carrots probably arrived from mutations of yellow forms, and then from human selection and development, probably in the Netherlands. It is thought that humans made selections from a gene pool involving yellow rooted eastern carrots, cultivated white-rooted derivatives of wild carrot (grown as medicinal plants since classical times) and wild unselected populations of adjacent Daucus Carota subspecies in Europe and the Mediterranean.