Aimless Wandering leads to Discovery

This time of year affords us with some marvelous weather, so one evening my roommates and I decided to enjoy it outside of our apartment. With no particular place to go, we decided to aimlessly wander. Our wanderings took us to the northern part of the apartment complex parking lot where a tiny garden had been planted last year. Earlier in the year we noticed some carrots growing there; we decided it was time to see what had become of them.

We were surprised to see the carrot greens towering a good three feet in the air. It was dark outside so I wondered if they were really just some tall weeds. I decided to pull one to find out and alas, it WAS a carrot, but one of which I had never seen anything similar (that I can remember). The 'stalk' was thick and hard...and really tall and when we reached the light of the parking lot we noticed a green flower-like thing on the plant.

We proudly and excitedly showed our discovery to everyone we saw. T even took a bite of the carrot, dirt and all, saying it tasted like a dry carrot. We decided it must have cross germinated with something else like celery or parsley. We gave T his half eaten carrot stalk and took the other to display in a vase on our table.

I talked to my mom a few days later and according to her this was no mutant carrot after all! I admit, I was a bit disappointed. It turns out that this is the way carrots go to seed. So, though we do not have some cool mutant vegetable on our hands, maybe we will try and harvest the seeds for next year:)

I have decided that I need to be more observant. My family had a garden always; how did I miss the 'mutant' carrots all these years? At the same time, had I known that these crazy tall carrots were 'normal' it would have smothered the excitement of finding something really cool and wanting to learn about it. Yeah for discoveries made while aimlessly wandering.