2022-07-17T07:00:00Z
[this post is from a discussion inside the Thinkific course, in response to the ‘Easy to Hard’ categories.
I see beets, carrots, onions, parsnips, and turnip listed as hard and for me that don’t figure. Those tap root biannuals to my experience are the easiest thing to land race, excluding things that you grow from fruit or seed anyway.
What’s nice about the biannual taproots is that you just plant a crop like normal, harvest like normal, and then rebury the best ones where you want to make crosses and auto seed another patch.
What’s nice is that you can grow, then can select based on final crop performance, and finally you just plop the roots in the ground, next spring you have huge shrubs of seed.
Here is a patch of carrots I am going to eat, or pick best roots for burying.
It was sowed by fallen seed from last year’s seed crop; e.g. I was messy. I place carrot flowers on the edges of my garden near favored neighbors so the pretty flowers make my garden fancy. I like that these patchs train carrots to germinate in early spring with no irrigation of care in weird mulch.
Here is this year’s carrot flower bloom, with some lofthouse pepper plants in foreground for scale.
I might get a gallon of seed off this patch. They are a couple dozen carrots burried in about 16 minutes last fall, the most diverse and prettiest of hundreds. Mostly excluding the yellow and white carrots, which I am biased against, I keep one or two for diversity, but they have to be otherwise perfect. Hoping the purple trait continue to through more interesting combinations with dark orange going forward.
I opine that such are excellent plants to start with.
All I need is to find one precocious plant of each species that can produce seeds in its first year. (Or two, if they’re not self-compatible.) Come on, trees! 
