Mine's bigger'n yours

So this weekend we harvested our first carrot. We felt much trepidation due to our last go round with root maggots. It turns out that our purple dragon carrots did not suffer the same fate. Good thing, too. Maggoty purple dragon carrots conjure up images of zombie vegetable dinosaurs, and I don’t need any more cast members for my nightmares.

We were rather excited to cut this up and try it out. And doesn’t it look cool! It was marketed as purple on the outside with the color bleeding in to the center, with an orange core. Our sample had the purple limited to just the surface, and it was really quite on the red side of purple. Sad to say, the carrot looked better than it tasted. Yes, it was large, but it was also woody. I know guys have a hard time (see what I did there?) understanding that this is ever a bad thing, but when it comes to carrots, woody is bad. One silver lining is that this does confirm what Dave was saying about inconsistent watering. The Burpee Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener book says woody tasteless carrots are usually the result of inconsistent soil conditions. (That is a fabulous book, by the way. NAYY.)

I wonder if that also explains my tasteless jokes? Carrots in bad taste, and that taste bad. And I know... this is a Mother Carey’s Chicken. If the strain of gardening is already bringing me to bawdy carrot jokes, ’tis an ill wind a-blowin’.