Wild Carrot Big Yellow 1992

Plant these just as you would regular carrots. Some will probably put up seed stalks the first year. Pull these out, since the roots get tough as soon as they put up seed stalks.

The white roots have only so-so flavor. The tasty roots are the pale-yellow ones. If you like them and want to grow the seeds, dig around the plants in the fall to see which ones have large, pale-yellow roots. Leave these in the ground over the winter, with soil mounded up over them to prevent mice from getting at them, and the second year they will put up seed stalks.

Context

Garland’s Town and Country Store in Lincoln was founded years ago by Cecil Garland. Back in the ’60s, Cecil fought to keep loggers and road builders out of what would become the Scapegoat Wilderness area. Some 20 years ago, Cecil moved to Utah, leaving the store to his daughters.

Teresa and Becky Garland knew Ted Kaczynski probably as well as anyone in Lincoln. Besides the letter he wrote to Becky (page 52), Ted left Teresa Garland one other memento: a packet of wild carrot seeds.

That was in 1994. The packet, which Teresa never opened, was handmade, apparently a couple of years earlier. In its sweeping search through town for possible evidence relevant to the Unabomber case, the fbi subpoenaed the packet, most likely to look for a trace of Ted Kaczynski’s dna on the sealed flap.

The careful instructions for planting and harvesting, a facsimile of which appears on the opposite page, were in Ted’s own writing.

Becky and Theresa Garland, daughters of pioneer environmentalist Cecil Garland who had attempted to clean up Big River, owned and ran Garland’s Town and Country Store in little Lincoln. At one point the Hermit would give Becky a letter that told of his childhood, lost youth, and lost love. It was his cold, but practical way of telling about himself. Like everything else, he did it indirectly. “He wrote about things that hurt him in his heart really bad, so that I would understand his feelings, that he was human,” she said afterward. He left something for Theresa, too— in 1992, she received a handmade packet of carrot seeds and a handwritten note from him that explained how to grow them.