Carrot

Daucus carota subsp. sativus

Apiaceae

The orange kitchen root — a biennial you pull in year one, with a folklore about eyesight that outran the soup.

Garden root is food. Wild carrot (Queen Anne’s lace) has deadly lookalikes in the same family — do not forage umbels you cannot name.

Parts used: Root · Young leaf (kitchen, modest)
Traditional notes: Kitchen root · Traditional winter staple · A cooked sweet
Grow · USDA 6b: Cool-season biennial, USDA 4–10 as a root crop Direct-sow. Thin ruthlessly or you grow threads. In work: Mar · Apr · May · Jun · Jul · Aug · Sep · Oct
Harvest: When shoulders are the size you want. A frost sweetens them.

Cover seed — it is slow and the rain crusts it.
Carrot fly: a fine mesh in some counties.
Leave a few for year-two umbels only if you want seed, and you know they are not hemlock.

Safety

Unidentified wild carrot-family plants Carrot juice as a replacement for meals

Companions

Plant with Chives, Garden sage, Onion, Pea, Rosemary, Spinach.

Keep apart from Dill, Fennel.

Lookalikes

Poison hemlock — Queen Anne’s lace and poison hemlock share a white umbrella. One is a taproot. The other shuts the nerves down.

Lore

The original carrot was purple, yellow, or white. Orange is a 17th-century Dutch patriotism story that may even be true. The Blitz-era tale that carrots gave RAF pilots night vision was a cover for radar. Your grandmother was not entirely wrong about the pigment. She was wrong about the Spitfire.

The Herbarium — a teaching catalog, not a clinic. Traditional use is history, not a prescription. USDA 6b dates are a week either way, not a promise. Do not eat, drink, or harvest a plant you cannot name.