the lost harvest
Last year I planted some carrots in, oh, July or something, just to see what would happen. How excited I was when the first little sprouts came up! I sat and watched them for hours. Then, sadly, the lack of nutrients in the soil and the aberrant weather (was it too wet or not wet enough? I can't remember) stopped any further growth, and the carrots and I both gave up. Well, imagine my surprise when, after the snow finally melted, I saw them poking up from the frozen ground, forced out by the frost heaves or what have you. How pretty they looked! Two to three inches of stunted carrot perfection each. Their taste, sadly, was not perfect. It turns out that carrots don't take kindly to freezing, or to being left in the ground for months and months, or for a combination of the two: all the carrot taste was subsumed into a vague sweetness, and the ice-damaged cell structure was rather lacking in the crispness you like to have in a carrot. Still, it was pretty cool to find them, and we can't complain: they exceeded any expectations I had for them by their very existence!