Hello my friends, welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast.

Today we have Linda Lee on the show and I confess, Linda, when I first started Epic Gardening

and in fact it wasn't even called that at the time, it was called X-Ponix, like a little

hydroponic blog, your blog Garden Betty was out there and it was a big source of blogging

inspiration in the early days of Epic Gardening so it's great to have you on the show.

Thank you, it's my pleasure being here.

So I know that you've got a cookbook coming out, the No Waste Vegetable Cookbook which

I know we're going to talk about and it kind of brings us to this topic of today's episode.

I didn't know that people thought the tops of carrots were poisonous, I just thought people

thought they didn't like the taste or something like that but where did this all start?

The fact that people think carrot tops are poisonous, I think it's because we don't really

see a lot of recipes for them, especially in this country, in the US.

So the first time I ever knew about this, I was walking into a whole food, buying a bunch

of groceries, you know they have great carrots with these full lush greens, not the gross

dingy ones that you usually see and the lady at the checkout counter asked me if she, if

I wanted her to just break them off and compost them and I was like, oh what do you mean?

I just, you just weighed them and I just paid for, you know, this entire vegetable.

She's like, oh, almost people don't use them, you know, I don't think you're supposed

to eat them and so we just get rid of them for you.

And that was sort of my first introduction to realizing how people treat a lot of these

odds and ends, like the tops and tails of vegetables that we grow at home that we typically

eat, but most people do not.

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