Trying Out the New Garden Sink

We have two rows of carrots in the back of the garden.  It's past time to pull them.  I pulled one of the rows yesterday.  You can kind of see where that row was in the lower part of the photo below.  I planted seven hills of zucchini and seven hills of crookneck squash between the carrot rows.  I hope I didn't jump the gun as I saw that after a week of temps in the upper 70's this week, early next week we'll see low temps at 33!

I had quite a pile of big fat carrots on the ground in front of the garden sink.  I couldn't actually put them in the sink as I have it against the garden fence and the cows were craning their necks over to try to eat the carrot greens.  Patience, cows!  I'm gonna feed them to you, but I have to cut the greens off the carrots first!

In the last week of January we had hard freezes for several nights with lows in the low 20's so I had turned the water valve off that controls water flow to the rear of the garden.  To wash up the carrots, I turned the valve back on.  Oh boy!  When I did that, water sprayed everywhere!  The sprayer portion is made of plastic, of course, and split right down the middle in the hard freeze.  I was sure that I had drained all the water out of it, but apparently not.  I'll have to replace the sprayer as it is beyond repair.  I was still able to wash all the carrots, in workaround fashion as I just held the carrots up to the busted sprayer handle.  Not exactly what I hoped for, but I was able to complete the job.

These are Danvers carrots and I waited too long to harvest them.  They'll still be good to eat, they're just fat and some are misshapen.  This happens when they are overcrowded and compete for nutrients.  I need to do a better job of thinning them out.  It's all good though.  We'll eat every last one of them.  I need to harvest that last row next week.

After washing them all up, I brought a big basket of carrots inside.  The basket must have weighed 15 pounds.

We'll roast most of these in the oven, but will also make Cream of Carrot soup, eat some of them raw on a vegetable platter with dip, shred some of them for use in cole slaw and sauerkraut, make fermented ginger carrots and finally make a big carrot cake!

I have to put another item on my to do list:  Fix the sprayer on the new garden sink before I harvest the other row of carrots.