Vegetable Oddities, continued.

Every year we plant Nantes carrots. They are sweet and crisp, they keep well, and the cylindrical shape means your carrot doesn't trail away to a scrawny little nothing at the root end. Like most of these assorted carrot varieties:

But Nature has her way of playing tricks, and you never quite know what will grow for you in any given year. Sometimes, you actually get a perfect carrot: 

I am about to slice it up on my mandolin, wearing --of course-- my cut-resistant glove (they are very fantastic: I would never recommend using  a mandolin slicer without one). Usually, you get typical carrots:  

Typical Nantes carrot
(it was about 7-8 inches long)

Then there are your atypical carrots. Your vegetable oddities, as it were: 

Typical carrot beside a behemoth "Grinning Cyclops"
 (no, that's not a variety; it's a mutation).

The size difference doesn't mean much without some kind of scale for reference, you say? I agree. So I brought in a familiar object to photograph beside the Cyclops. Yes, Virginia, that's a BASEBALL BAT.

(I wonder if anyone has ever been bludgeoned to death by a carrot.)

Or scared to death by one?