The other night while out walking with my family, I asked my young son what I should write about for my next newspaper column.

At first he eagerly started talking about cars. I reminded him that I needed to write about gardening.

After thinking for a moment, he answered that I should write about carrots. A home-grown carrot is one of my son's favorite foods. So this week's column is for Henry!

QUEEN ANNE'S LACE
The carrot (Daucus carota subsp. Sativus) is one of the most widely eaten vegetables.

Carrots are known as root vegetables, because the edible portion of the plant is the taproot. The cultured form of carrots that we grow and consume has been domesticated from a wild plant we know as Queen Anne's lace, native to Europe and southwestern Asia.

The carrot that we plant and eat today has been selectively bred to be much larger, more palatable and have a less woody-texture than its wild counterpart. Despite the differences in appearance, texture and taste, it is still the same plant.

Carrots are biennial plants. The first year, these plants grow a rosette of leaves and store a large amount of sugars in its stout taproot. If left in the ground, the carrot uses the stored sugars the second year to send up a 3-foot-tall white flower and produce seeds.

Originally, carrots were not grown for their taproots.

Like their close relatives parsley, fennel, dill and cumin, they were grown for their aromatic leaves and seeds. The first mention of carrot roots being eaten is in the first century in Asia. They were introduced to European gardens sometime between the eight and 10th centuries.

Descriptions of these carrots were both red and yellow. The modern orange carrot description does not appear in historical literature until the 17th century in the Netherlands.

ROOT SHAPE
Carrot cultivars can be grouped into two broad classes — the eastern carrot and the western carrot.

Eastern carrots were domesticated in Central Asia in the 10th century. They are branched roots that are commonly purple or yellow.

The western carrot is historically a single-taproot plant, orange in color, though other colors including white, yellow, red and purple do exist. These colors of carrot are raised primarily as novelty crops by home gardeners.

Western carrot cultivars are commonly classified by their root shape:

  Chantenay carrots are shorter than other cultivars, but have greater girth, sometimes growing up to 3 inches in diameter. They have broad shoulders and taper towards a blunt, rounded tip.

  Danvers carrots have a conical shape, having well-defined shoulders and tapering to a point. They are somewhat shorter than Imperator cultivars but more tolerant of heavy soil. They were developed in 1871 in Danvers, Mass.

  Imperator carrots are the kind most commonly sold whole in U.S. supermarkets; their roots are longer than other cultivars and taper to a point.

  Nantes carrots are nearly cylindrical in shape and are blunt and rounded at both the top and tip. Nantes cultivars are often sweeter than other carrots.

STILL TIME TO PLANT
Carrots can be harvested before reaching full size as a tender "baby" carrot, and some fast-maturing cultivars have been bred to produce smaller roots. These small cultivars are also more tolerant of heavy or stony soil than long-rooted cultivars such as Nantes or Imperator.

The "baby carrots" sold ready to eat in supermarkets are, however, often not from a smaller cultivar of carrot but are simply full-sized carrots that have been sliced and peeled to make carrot sticks of a uniform shape and size.

It is not too late to plant carrots in your garden this year. Look for a shorter season variety when shopping for your seed. And remember to keep the seeds evenly watered while you are waiting for them to sprout. They can take up to 21 days to emerge from the seed bed.

When I plant carrots, I like to purchase pelleted seeds. Carrot seeds are tiny and hard to handle due to their small size. The pelleted seeds are coated, making them larger and easier to space in the seed bed. Another option is to purchase a seed tape. These are long, thin sheets of biodegradable paper imbedded with seeds. You simply lay the tape in the garden and bury it with soil.

Anne Lenox Barlow is the horticulture educator with Cornell Cooperative Extension in Clinton County. Office phone numbers: Clinton County 561-7450, Essex County 962-4810, Franklin County 483-7403. E-mail questions to: askMG@cornell.edu.