Purple Carrots...

Gardens can reflect the person who tends it.

Ours has a tendency to surprise people.

We always pick a few things that start a conversation.

Things we've never grown before or things that are a little less ordinary.

freshly picked carrots purple and orange

Take carrots for example.

You can grow a regular orange carrot...but the fun comes when you grow different colours of carrots!

Gently scrubbed purple carrot

I see Farmboy sells special carrots at a premium price in purple, red and yellow.

Silly Farmboy...you can grow fancy carrots for a lot less...

Few people know the carrot's natural state is white.

The root of Queen Anne's Lace 

(Daucus carota aka Wild Carrot, bishop's lace, bird's nest) 

is white and if its growing anywhere 

near your carrot patch...so will your cultivated carrots be white.

Cross pollination is fun! 

purple carrots peeled and sliced

We love to experiment in the garden.

If you grow something new, you get to experiment in the kitchen!

We discovered you can grow purple beans, but if you try to cook them, they turn back to green!

We found out that if you cook a purple carrot, it will turn the water blue.

I read that you shouldn't peel a coloured carrot, lest you peel all the different colour away.

THE LESSON PURPLE CARROTS TAUGHT ME:
You should wear rubber gloves when peeling purple carrots...
as the colour stains your hands much THE LESSON THAT BEETS TAUGHT ME.

As you can see from the image above...

the colour runs pretty much through a good chunk of the flesh of this vegetable.

It also looks SPECTACULAR on a tray of veggie sticks.

What do you grow just for the novelty?