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.



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.





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



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.



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!



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