Les Carottes -- Science in the Neighbourhood

Two blocks away from our house in Dijon, on the way to the tunnel that goes under the High Speed Rail (or TGV) train track, we discovered a very large garden with a single row of carrots.

The fenced-in yard of the house was quite big, and nearly all of it was tilled, but only one single row of lush carrots was planted.

We watched the stages of growth throughout our stay, and at long last could see some of the tops of the carrots starting to show above the ground.  They were green!



"this picshur is of me putting mi sord thro the fens to point to the carit pach."



The carrots never did turn orange.  They remained green!  Were they supposed to be green?  Or had they just not ripened?  (Annabeth says, "This is me and Shawn picking the carrots for the bunnies and deer and chickens."  Hmmmm... she has given us a clue to the mystery...)



 

"this is the carit pach."

We used this mystery as an opportunity to introduce ourselves to some neighbours, to ask them why the carrots stayed green.  Shawn recalls that they told us "the animals eat them."  You see, across the street there was a family that raised rabbits in their backyard, and they rented room in the garden to grow carrots for their rabbits.

And feed carrots (much like feed corn back in Canada), are different from regular carrots.  Mystery solved!

One day just before we left in mid-December, the carrots were all gone, and we knew that the rabbits had a tasty treat that night.




(We never did see the green carrots come out of the ground, but here is a hard-to-find photo from the Internet).