Purple carrots revival at the Maara Kai

PURPLE carrots were the choice when Centennial Park School pupils were asked what they wanted to grow at the Maara Kai Roopu during a recent visit.

The school has taken over a corner of the garden in which to grow food for the community.

“I’m supplying all the seeds and they are growing them for the foodbank,” gardener Michelle Wī said.

“They are following it right from the start so they can understand the whole process.”

Classes from the school will follow the process from soil preparation to donating the harvest to the foodbank. They are there on Thursdays and Fridays.

“They come for about an hour, do a bit of weeding and gain a bit of knowledge. They are taken around and they have a feed of all the foraging foods that are still around,” Michelle said.  

“We have a good talk with them, they are happy as Larry, especially with the fact that we have got potatoes. They feel like they are on a treasure hunt every week.

The children asked to grow carrots after Michelle told them they were not originally orange. They have all decided to grow purple carrots.

“So, their job is to work on that soil to make sure there are no rocks and things,” she said.

A Google search reveals that before the 17th Century – in the 1600s – carrots were mostly purple in colour with some black and some white.  

In the late 1600s, Dutch growers developed mutant strains of the purple carrot into the orange carrot we know today.

The purple carrots were grown in the Afghanistan region 5000 years ago and are also believed to have been grown in Egypt 4000 years ago.

Purple carrots contain all the nutrients of orange carrots, but they’ve also been shown to have greater anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative effects.

A recent Australian study showed the purple pigment that cases the carrot contained up to 28 times more anthocyanin antioxidants than those in orange carrots.

Carrots in general help protect against cardiovascular disease and cancer.