A Hurried Harvest of Carrots

With the winter weather approaching with quickness, we frantically covered most of the garden.  Note to self:  Purchase additional tarps.  You cannot have too many tarps to cover plants, fruit trees and hay.  I remembered from previous freezes that carrots will make it just fine in a freeze.  However, the cows were standing by the fence, and I knew that severe cold weather was coming.  If I could feed them all the carrot tops from our three rows, that would give them a belly-full and a good head start on the cold.  Why not just harvest all of the carrots?  I had plenty of nervous energy, so I went and got the digging forks to aid in the job.

I generally plant 3 rows of carrots, with a different variety on each row.  The first variety is Cosmic Purple.  The outside "wrapper" of the carrot is purple.  However, the inside of the carrot is orange.

Here is a new variety for us.  I used to plant Atomic Red Carrots.  They were no longer available, so I opted for Kyoto Red Carrots.  They produced really well.  Lots of carrots and they were the biggest of the three varieties.

Finally, we have our traditional orange carrot - Danvers is the name of the variety.

I put them in a bin and left them on the back patio overnight.  Well, by the time we woke up the next morning, this is what the carrots looked like!  I got a big Rubbermaid-type tub and put several gallons of warm water in it.  I stood on the back patio and hand-washed every carrot, working fast before the warm water turned to frigid water.

Here are the Cosmic purple carrots all washed up:

Here are the Kyoto Red Carrots:

And finally the Danvers carrots.  This was not a good year for the Danvers variety.  They are usually very consistent.  This year, for whatever reason, the size was smaller than in previous years for this variety.

This cold weather is "soup weather."  After Chicken and sausage gumbo and potato soup, the next soup on the agenda was Cream of Carrot soup.  Then we've been eating oven-roasted carrots as a side dish.  So good!  We'd better be careful, though.  It is fact, not fiction, that if you eat too many carrots, the high level of beta-carotene will cause your skin to turn orange!