A Gallon of Carrots for the Freezer

First an update on the rogue chicken that was in the garden and we posted about. Yesterday afternoon Benjamin and I drove to the local hardware store and purchased a 50 foot roll of welded wire that is 36 inches high and has 2"x4" holes in it.  There are places in the hog wire fence in the back yard where the goats have stood on the fencing to help them reach the leaves of a willow tree.  The goats like to eat the leaves, but in so doing, they've stretched out the fence and that allows the trespassing chicken to squeeze through the enlarged holes in the fence and then quickly make her way to the garden.

We fastened the fencing over the stretched-out fence and called it a day, stepping back and nodding approval at out job.  Knowing that the holes in the picket fence had been (temporarily) patched and adding an additional 50 feet of fencing, I asked Tricia, "So do you think the hen will find her way out again?"  We both optimistically remarked that our efforts did the trick.

This evening I asked if the chicken had visited the garden.  Tricia answered in the affirmative and said she had to toss the hen out of the garden again and that she had eaten a little more of the remaining cabbages.  Arrgghh!  That fat hen is asking to be a contributor to our next chicken and sausage gumbo.

So on to the topic of the day.  Last week we harvested a nice bucket of carrots and that represented about 33% of our carrot production for the year.  We still have two more rows to harvest.

We've eaten some of them raw and cooked some with butter, but we need to blanch some so that we can freeze some to extend the harvest and we can enjoy carrots all year long.  Benjamin and I peeled all the carrots and cut the tops off, feeding the tops and peelings to the chickens.  We used a "As seen on TV" product that Tricia bought to chop all the carrots up uniformly.  It works pretty good.

I started a pot of water boiling and once it boiled, I put all the chopped up carrots in the water.  When it began to boil again, I set the timer for 5 minutes.

When they had boiled for five minutes, I spooned them out of the boiling water and immediately put them in iced water to immediately stop the cooking.  I let them continue to cool for ten minutes and took them out of the water and filled quart-sized freezer bags with the fresh blanched carrots.

In a very short time, we had 4 quarts of carrots ready to put into the deep freeze for us to enjoy later.

For now, we'll continue to eat them freshly pulled out of the ground, fresher than you can get anywhere and speaking of pulling things from the ground, I think I'll pull the remaining cabbages from the garden tomorrow so that miserable hen doesn't eat them.  That's another good thing about carrots - they are a root crop and the hen can't get to those!