Matías Cid, a 68-year-old resident of Urretxu from Zamora, is still surprised by what he found in his garden: a carrot weighing more than a kilo. “I never imagined I would see what I saw that day,” he admits, still in disbelief. 20 minutes. The man, who worked as a boilermaker all his life, has been farming “as a hobby” on a farm for years, but he never thought “that he could encounter something like this.”
And there’s no trick here. “I buy the seeds that come in an envelope,” admits the Gipuzkoan, who only “he uses fertilizer from a farm, which a friend of his cows brings me” and believes that the vegetable’s enormous size could be due to something as simple as a plant shortage. “This year I hatched a few and left them there longer than I should have,” explains Cid, who adds that “they are very separated from each other and have a lot of land for each of them.”
This magnitude appears to have allowed some roots to grow disproportionately. And there are still surprises to discover because you haven’t cultivated them all yet. “You can see their heads and they will look like this” says the man, who harvests “little by little” the vegetables he needs for his daily consumption.
An almost extinct variety
Despite the wait generated by the carrot, Matías admits that his greatest pride is not this vegetable, but an almost extinct plant: Martina lettuce. It is a variety from the Sierra d’Alavesa that received this name after the Basque Government found a woman who preserved it.
“When I saw the news, I thought I have been eating this lettuce for a long time.“, he recalls with a laugh. Twenty years ago, he received seeds and since then, he has made sure that they do not go to waste. Each season, he lets a plant grow and saves the seeds.
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