Monday, January 3, 2011

Carrot Harvest

As usual I've been remiss in my updates, but I had to share pictures of our carrots. I participate in the Square Foot Gardening Forum and there's a young man there who offered to send my son some seeds for world-record sized carrots. I swapped him some yellow mushroom bean seeds and my husband built a 2x2 bed that's quadruple-depth, since those carrots could grow as long as a foot. My son was beside himself with excitement when we planted the seeds but I was apprehensive because I tried carrots last year and the carrot maggot flies got to them, so we didn't get much of a harvest. This year I planted radishes amongst the carrots and it seems to have worked, because there was no maggot fly damage at all! I pulled this carrot from the ground December 5th and it was the largest in the bed.

Biggest Carrot

The ground froze solid before I remembered the carrots were still in the bed and I didn't mulch them, so I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get them out of the ground. New Year's weekend was unseasonably warm, reaching the mid-50's, and my beloved husband went out to the garden and freed the carrots.

The Aftermath

My Hero

Here's the harvest, all cleaned up. There was over six pounds of carrots!

Carrot Harvest

And here's what I did with them... the biggest of the orange ones canned as Dilly Carrots, using a recipe from the book Put 'em Up, which is a great book about preserving food.

Canned Carrots

I saved the exotic ones and the smaller orange ones and steamed them. They're as beautiful steamed as they were when we harvested them. I'm glad I snitched a couple of the white and yellow ones, because my son ate the entire bowl!

Steamed Carrots

I can't wait to grow more carrots next year!

1 comment:

Dale said...

They look delicious! Glad you were able to get to them before it really was too late!