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!

Seeing Red

Most mornings we try to get up and pour a mug of coffee and sit in the sun room before the sun rises.  We'll read a chapter or two in the Bible and the commentary notes to aid in context and understanding.  We're in the book of Micah now about to finish up.  It is a peaceful way to start the morning.  The sun room is aptly named.  It has a big window that faces east and we look out and watch the day begin, slowly and then in earnest.  On this particular morning, God was painting a masterpiece in the eastern sky, using blazing red, bright orange and muted pink and rounded out on top with columbia blue hues on His palette.  The red, specifically, was something to see!  "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning," I think the old Navy warning said.

But we weren't done with things red on this beautiful day.  We had already harvested the Cosmic Purple carrots last week, but before the upcoming rains, we needed to get all the Kyoto Red carrots pulled.  Tricia and I teamed up on the task, pulling, washing, clipping the tops off and feeding the carrot tops to the cows.  

While the cosmic purple carrots have purple skins and an orange interior, Kyoto Red carrots are red through and through.  In the past some of our carrots grew into weird shapes with multiple roots.  Not this year.  The Kyoto reds grew long and straight.

We brought them inside, scrubbed them with a vegetable brush and used a sharp knife to cut them into manageable pieces to cube into the vegetable chopper.  This photo shows how the carrots are a red tint all throughout.

They are quickly all cubed up and ready for processing.  The other day, with the cosmic purple carrots, we blanched and froze 10 quarts.  I think we'll pressure can most of these carrots.  When two people are inseparable, there's an old saying that goes, "They go together like peas and carrots."  These cubed up Kyoto red carrots remind me of that.  We would eat Swanson Hungry Man TV dinners sometimes when I was a kid.  I haven't eaten a TV dinner in a coon's age.  But these carrots cubed up remind me of the side dish of peas and carrots in those dinners in aluminum trays.

We began filling the jars hot pack and load into the pressure canner.  The canner will hold 10 at a time.  We'll have several batches to go until we get the job done.

Once we have the red carrots processed, we'll begin with the (boring) orange carrots.  We still have a row of those to harvest.