How can such a robust vegetable, whose meaty root creates hearty soups and other flavourful dishes, whose juices can stain practically any fabric and surface with only minor contact, whose intensity is unparalleled in the pickle jar, and which can cause a grown man to shriek from the bathroom until he remembers what he had for supper the previous night — how can such a vegetable be so pathetically puny and uncompetitive as a seedling?
It defies explanation.
