Harvesting/Blanching Cosmic Purple Carrots

I like growing stuff with crazy colors that taste great.  Cosmic Purple Carrots fit the bill nicely.  Harvesting carrots is back breaking labor and that is why it is advantageous to have the assistance of a young Carrot Harvester with a fresh, strong back at my service.  We've received a nice bit of rain lately, so if you grab the carrots by the carrot tops and pull, the purple root pops right on up with ease.

The lush, green growth of the carrot tops always is a stark contrast to the dormant, brown grass of the pasture.  The cows take particular notice of this and we toss them all the carrot tops which they quickly consume.  Our young carrot harvester straddles the row and labors away under the cows' supervision.

Carrot Harvester

In no time at all he's more than filled a bucket with beautiful, fat Cosmic Purple Carrots.

Bucket 'o Carrots

So much was harvested that he had to stack them up on the row as they would no longer fit in the bucket. They are pretty carrots, but not near as striking as they are once you wash them.

Pile of Carrots

We don't want to wash our good topsoil down the drain, so we wash the dirt off the carrots in buckets and will pour the dirty water back in the garden.

Washin' off the dirt

Now that the majority of the dirt is washed off of them and is in the bucket below, we can take them inside.

All washed up

First, of course, we'll pull the tops off and walk over to the edge of the pasture. There's some Jersey cows that are pretty interested in them.

Nice lookin' purple carrots

I put them on the scale and found that in a very short period of time, Benjamin had pulled a little over 13 pounds of carrots from the fertile soil.  We brought a bunch of carrots to each of our neighbors and we'll eat some sliced carrots cooked in butter for lunch.  So Sweet!  But what about the rest of 'em?

Well, we'll blanch them and freeze them.  We just ran out of frozen carrots from last years' crop, so this harvest couldn't have come at a better time.  I began cutting off the very top and very bottom and slicing them into disks.  Check out the carrot on the top left of the cutting board below.  It is a double and looks like a guy with red pants on!

I had a full bowl of them sliced when I remembered that Tricia bought one of those mandolin choppers, so I pulled that out and boy, did it ever make the job go faster.  In no time I had lots of cubed carrots.  You can see how the purple carrot is only purple on the outside.  The inside is orange like a normal carrot.

Cubed Carrots

I got a big pot of water boiling and dumped the first batch of carrots into the boiling water.  Once it began to boil again, I set the timer for 2 minutes.  Once 2 minutes passed, I removed them from the boiling water and put them into a container with ice water to immediately stop the cooking process.  I let them sit until they were totally cold to the touch.

Chilling the carrots

Then I began bagging them up in quart and gallon sized freezer bags.

Bagging up the carrots

With Benjamin's morning harvest, we filled 1 gallon bag and 3 quart bags of blanched, chopped and sliced carrots.

Ready to Freeze

We'll put these in the freezer to use throughout the year.  We've found that you can just easily break off just the amount you need for a meal.  We'll continue to eat fresh carrots as long as they last, but like a squirrel with hidden acorns, it is nice to have some stored away for using later.