By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer
In addition to the cabbage and leafy winter crops my co-blogger Jim McCausland mentioned in a recent post, if you live in northern California zones 7-9 and 14-17, southern California zones 18-21 and 22-24, and Southwest zones 10-13 you can also start root vegetables from seed now.
Here's the root crop I plan to grow after tasting this carrot raw fresh out of Marilee Kuhlman and Leigh Curran's front yard veggie garden.
'Purple Haze' has the long, slim shape typical of an Imperator-type carrot and has a dark purple outside skin and a deep-orange center. It is beautiful raw, especially sliced in rounds. 'Purple Haze' is not ultra-sweet but instead is rather earthy. You know you're eating a root. I liked that. It doesn't lose its purple color when cooked, but it is not as intense.
(To see what 'Purple Haze' looks like sliced, see the photo on A Sonoma Garden's blog.)
Purple carrots, I've since discovered, are hardly new. Carrots were purple, white, and yellow before they were orange. Orange, the color we associate with carrots now, wasn't actually developed until the 16th century. (Dutch breeders bred the vegetable to grow in the colours of the House of Orange.)
If you like knowing this sort of thing, you can read all about it at the World Carrot Museum website. Isn't it great that there actually is such a place?
Seed sources for `Purple Haze'
