Is it true that someone has invented red carrots?
That ingenious someone is nature. Although many commercial seed companies are offering colorful, hybridized carrots for sale (and have been for years), they haven't invented anything that nature hadn't already thought up on her own.
Carrots naturally come in a wide range of colours, including white, yellow, orange, red, purple, and black (actually a very dark purple). Although we normally associate carrots with the color orange, the earliest orange-fleshed varieties didn't appear until the 1500s. Prior to that, cultivated carrots were mostly purple or yellow.
Somewhere along the line, someone decided that carrots were going to be orange. That same mysterious someone also decided that beets were going to be purple when, in fact, they naturally come in all of the colors that carrots do.
Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to cultural norms and as a result generation after generation of gardeners handed down the non-sanctioned hues of these vegetables and they continue to survive so that the present generation can reconnect with its colorful past.
What's interesting about many of these so-called “heritage” or “heirloom” varieties is that not only do the colors vary greatly, but so do the flavors. That's not to suggest that an heirloom carrot will taste like an apple, but it'll likely taste slightly different from any carrot you've ever bought in a grocery store and in my experience the taste is often more expressive, much like the subtle variations in flavors that you can get from a fine wine.
Color and flavor are just two of the ways that heritage varieties can deviate from the established norm. Once you start exploring, you’ll find all sorts of weird and wonderful vegetables that will happily grow alongside more conventional varieties. Some of them can be real show-stoppers.
You can even play around with cross-pollinating vegetables in your own garden and see what you come up with. Squashes are great for this. Chances are, seed companies will have nothing to fear from the results, but that's not really the point. This type of experimentation can open your eyes to just how limited our ideas of what a vegetable can be truly are and just how flexible nature is when left to do her thing.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them to me at vanessa@gardenmuse.ca.
