By Glenn I. Teves, County Extension Agent, UH CTAHR
When you think of an orange vegetable, carrots come to mind, but once upon a time the most common color of carrots wasn’t orange. It wasn’t until the 1500s that the Dutch stumbled upon an orange carrot and focused on developing more orange varieties.
Believed to be native to the area around Afghanistan, the first carrots were purple and yellow. Around A.D. 900-1200, they spread to the eastern Mediterranean, then to China and Eastern Europe by the 1300s. By the 1600s, yellow carrots reached Japan, but it wasn’t until the 1700s that orange carrots emerged in Holland and adjacent areas. White and yellow carrots are still used for livestock in eastern and western Europe, while red carrots are popular in Japan.With the quest for new color choices in vegetables, we’ve gone full circle with the return of colorful carrots with names like Atomic Red, Nutri-Red, Purple Haze, Purple Dragon, Mello Yellow Scarlet Wonder and Rainbow. Breeding by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to develop a high Vitamin A carrot led to the development of a cultivar called A Plus, which increased the carotene content by leaps and bounds. A collateral benefit was improved taste, especially sweetness.
A nemesis of the carrot is the root-knot nematode causing galls on the roots, and this microscopic eelworm is common in many of our soils. A solution is to grow cover crops, such as Sunn Hemp, African Marigolds, Sorghum-Sudangrass Hybrids, or a variety of cowpea called Iron and Clay.