Ooh those dirty little carrots....Ok, so remember when I talked all big about weeding my garden, taking a day off, blah blah blah? Well, I haven't touched it since then, aside from taking the last ripe tomatoes and a chili pepper to make a big pot of kick-ass chili.... that was three weeks ago.
We had an early frost here in Minneapolis... about 2 weeks ahead of the average date, so I've been watching all of my flowers loose their cellular structure, species by species. Tomatoes go after the impatiens, but they are the next to go... then the raspberries, zuchinni, cukes and bell peppers. I spent about 30 minutes ripping out all of these soggy, nasty plants today. Then I turned around, and looked at the carrot patch. I've been neglecting it all summer - the happy little fringy tops growing away, even though I never thinned the few rows I seeded in June. I was delighted to see that the tops were still green, which meant that it wasn't too late for harevsting the carrots! Yipppeeee!
I grabbed the pitch fork, and with laser accuracy, dug up the entire patch in three turns. Then comes the most favorite activity of any veggie gardener... discovering the buried treasures that were hidden in seed form a long four months ago. Were there any? Where they long or short? did the non-thinning negatively impact the crop? The picture above confirms that I produced a bumper crop of "Sweet Mini" variety carrots - they turned out exactly as they should have... non thinning and all.... ahhhhh I love being a lazy gardener!
And now a good portion of them are destined for some stew that I assembled during the MN Vikings game. Good thing I got the stew meat cut up before the last 3 or 4 minutes of the game... I might have thrown the knife at the TV!
Time to add the carrots and the shamefully uniform red potatoes that were purchased at the local store.... I love growing potatoes... just not enough return on my investment. I'll figure out the ROI on the carrots.... after I taste them in the stew!
Pretty little things when they are all cleaned up!
For some reason, carrots were our best crop but they look a lot like yours, short. Do you know why that is? There are soem long ones but mostly short runts. I wonder if we plant them to close together.
ReplyDeleteCould be either the soil or the seed variety that you buy. Since I have such dense (clay) soil, I buy the short, stubby variety on purpose - usually a Nantes variety - the long and skinny ones available don't really do well in my soil. I looked at the packet yesterday (I keep them all the way until next spring to remember what I do and don't like from the previous year), and these are definitely short on purpose! Maybe yours are too!
ReplyDeleteAlso - thinning them through the season helps them grow more evenly, but that won't help the length - just the diameter. Less thinning = skinny carrots.
Carrots are easily my favorite vegetable. Since I despise most of the others, but still want to get a few servings in, I have a 5.5 ounce can of low sodium V8 every couple days. It doesn't taste good (not to me, anyway), but I can chug it pretty fast.
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