Genetic Diversity Matters: A Field Exploration of 695 Carrot Varieties;Nitrogen & Ammonia:From the Industrial Revolution to a Future Nitrogen Economy;

In the summer between 4th and 5th grade my Grandpa Deutsch let me work with him on his vegetable garden in the backyard of a rental property he owned on Lincoln Ave that backed up to the Illinois Central spur in Dixon IL.  We sowed and we hoed and we growed green beans, wax beans, leaf lettuce, cabbage, snap peas, beets, turnips, rutabagas, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, sweet corn, acorn squash, butternut squash, hubbard squash, mixed gourds, and pumpkins.  It was a big garden.

There were two more root crops in the garden. Grandpa also show me how to sow a few radish seeds in with the carrot seeds, which we scattered in beds the width of the span of a garden rake, rather than in rows.  Radish seedlings popped up faster than any other plant, and they marked out the bed.  They were a kind of nurse crop because the germination of the carrot seeds was so slow, stretched out, and sporadic.  The Cherry Belles and the Scarlet Globes would be done and gone in 30 days, and left behind were the bright green wisps of Nantes Coreless seedlings.  It took all summer for the spindly carrot-tops to grow to size enough to seize.  Toward the end of August came the times of the tines, the miracle of the digging forking prying the astonishingly orange carrots out of the black soil; harvesting green onions, sweet potatoes, even red radishes paled in comparison.

Nine summers later I worked mowing roads for Lee County, an ironic job for a biology major, but one that let me be impressed for the first time of how a fetch of Queen Anne’s lace in full flower could etch a line of white across a stretch of highway cutting through the prairie.  Queen Anne’s lace, I was to learn in my plant taxonomy class, was the same species as carrot, but introduced as a weed from Europe.