Parts of a carrot

Most of the time when we buy a carrot, we are buying only the storage root of the vegetable. As in most vegetables, there’s more to the carrot than what we see at first glance. When carrots grow in the earth, only a small portion of the part we commonly call a carrot is visible above the surface of the soil. Most of the carrot is buried. The buried part is the storage root and the visible part is called the hypocotyl. The top of the hypocotyl, where the carrot surface rounds towards the stalks, is the shoulder or crown. Where the stalks meet the root is a groove called the collar. The collar can be very slight or very pronounced. The little hairy roots emanating from the sides of the storage root are called lateral roots, and the root at the tip of the carrot is the taproot. The botanical term for the stalks is the petiole. There may be a remnant of the petiole still attached to the carrot if, like most shoppers, you purchase carrots without their greens attached. The carrot doesn’t have a truly separate skin. When we pare or scrape a carrot, we are removing the periderm. The periderm is simply the outer edge or surface of the phloem. The phloem is the body – I haven’t found a generic name for this part of the carrot, so I’ve chosen body – but doesn’t include the xylem, or core. The core is considered the woody portion of the storage root, but both it and the phloem are the vascular tissue that conducts sugars and other metabolic products downward from the leaves. Between the xylem and the phloem is a layer called the cambium. It is from this thin layer that the two vascular portions grow.