Fresh Carrots from the Garden!

Our carrots are coming in right now.  It seems every year as our soil gets more healthy, the carrot crop gets better.  I love the lush, green growth of the carrot tops. We harvest the carrots, wash them up real good, and either eat them fresh, blanch and freeze them, or can them so that we can enjoy them year round.  It just so happens that we ate our last bag of frozen blanched carrots from last year's crop, so the ripening carrots from this year's crop are just in time.

Green is my favorite color

We grow four different types of carrots in our garden: Parisienne Carrots, Atomic Red Carrots, Cosmic Purple Carrots, and Berlicum Carrots.  Here is a shot of carrots from each of the above mentioned varieties except for Atomic Red.  The Atomic Red Carrots, for some reason, are not quite ready yet.  I'm going to allow them to grow for a month more.

Colorful Carrots

Here are the Berlicum Carrots.  They are a normal orange carrot that grows to be a nice size and resembles your typical carrot.

Berlicum Carrots

These are the Cosmic Purple Carrots.  They grow a little fatter than the others.  The Purple coloration is just the outside skin, though.  Once you cut them, the internal portion is orange.  

Cosmic Purple Carrots

These are Parisienne Carrots.  They grow in little balls that are sized about the size of a Ping Pong ball and are good cooked in stews or soups.

Parisienne Carrots

Here is a sampling of each type of carrot, with a couple of radishes I pulled thrown in for good measure. Since the Atomic Red Carrots aren't ripe yet, I wanted something red to take its place.

Nice colorful root vegetables

A nice vegetable tableau:

Root Vegetables

Some of the carrots I pull will come up with lots of dirt on them.  So that I don't remove any topsoil from the garden, I'll generally wash them in the garden first and throw the muddy water back in the garden.  Then I'll wash them a little better inside, because we don't peel the skins off of them before we eat them.  We'll slice them and steam them or cook them in other dishes as is.  Regardless of the color, they all taste like carrots.

Rinsed and Ready

Tonight I pulled a nice head of Oak Leaf Lettuce along with the carrots.

Oak Leaf Lettuce

The lettuce accompanied with sliced radishes, criolla sella peppers and satsumas made a delicious salad.

When it comes time for putting some of the carrots away, we'll show you the various ways we do it.   I'll also show you what the Atomic Red Carrots look like.