A freak of nature

I was making some beef stew tonight when I realized that I forgot to buy carrots at the store this week. So I ran down to the vegetable stand on the corner of the street to grab some. The lady had the single largest carrot I had ever seen in my entire life. I made a large quantity of soup. It had 16 cups of stock in it. That's a gallon, for those of you who are counting. This one single carrot was enough for the whole pot. 

The freakishly large carrot, next to a standard teaspoon for reference. 

It was so incredibly large. This is it standing up on it's end. See how small the spoon looks waaaaaay down there? It was so large that when I sliced it in half, it behaved like a very ripe watermelon. I cut the bottom half and the top half split and cracked all on its own. I didn't know carrots could do that. 

The side view. I had to cut this thing into 1/8s, and it was STILL rather large chunks for a soup.