Carrots of Love

This will be my last post on carrots for a while, I promise.  In yesterday's post I talked about some odd shapes that our carrots grow in.  Because I don't thin my carrots out, they grow close together. The close proximity to one another causes them to grow in odd angles and sometimes they intertwine in interesting angles and grow in funny shapes.

This is my favorite one.  I call it the Love Carrots.  They are a couple of Cosmic Purple carrots that I pulled up last year or the year before and I saved the picture.  It looks like a couple snuggling.

Carrots of Love

As if not to be outdone by their purple brethren, a couple of pairs of carrots were pulled up from the carrot bed in similar fashion this year.  There's just so much love in our garden.  It's getting close to Valentine's Day, you know?  It's almost as if a Barry White song should be playing in the background.

Love is in the air (and ground!)

Unlike the purple carrots, these were almost growing together to form one carrot, but I popped them apart so I could clean the dirt in the nooks and crannies before we ate them.

Breaking up is hard to do...

I just couldn't keep the happy couple separated, though...

Love, Love will keep us together

Here's the carrots from yesterday, in case you missed them.  On the bottom of the chopper is a carrot that looks just like someone with some purple pants on.  The carrot on the top right looks like someone's leg, bent at the knee.

Here's one that I call "The lady carrying the baby" carrot.  She has one arm and the baby is tucked underneath the arm like she's taking good care of her baby.

Baby Carrot

You can see how lovingly she has her baby tucked underneath her arm, so as not to drop her.

And finally, we have the "Fat man in tight purple pants" carrot.  He looks like he's walking as he has his right leg out.  He has rolls of fat on his legs, so it's a good thing he's exercising.

He needs to go up a size or two in those tight pants

All right.  That's enough foolishness.  We'll stop looking at them and start eating them!  Some of them might look funny, but they taste delicious.

The Love Carrots

I love carrots - but that's not what this post is about.  I'll get to that in a minute. Sunday afternoon after a great lunch, I ventured out to the garden.  I have three rows of carrots that need to be harvested.  With a little over 2 inches of rain last week, the ground was soft and conducive for carrot pulling.

I started working on the Cosmic Purple Carrot row.  We've gone through this row several times now, picking out all the biggest, nicest looking carrots.  Today, I figured I would harvest all that we have left on the row so we could cook some in butter tonight and blanch and freeze the rest.  Carrot pulling, regardless how soft the soil is, is back breaking labor! I filled up three quarters of a five gallon bucket with carrots while feeding the carrot tops to the cows.

Some dirty carrots

I brought the bucket of carrots up close to the water hose and adjusted the nozzle to the jet setting and sprayed off all the dirt and mud.  What a transformation!  It's as if you turned on the lights or something.

All cleaned up

I pulled off the remaining carrot greens and root hairs and left those, along with the muddy water, in the bucket.  I'll go pour that all back in the garden.  I don't want to remove one bit of topsoil that I worked so hard to build from the garden. 

An overflowing colander of carrots

Now, getting to the title of the post, while pulling cosmic purple carrots, not two days removed from Valentine's Day, I unearthed what I call the "LOVE CARROTS".  I was a little embarrassed at first in interrupting the carrots' cuddle-time.

Love Carrots

But in the end, I pulled them up and separated them.  Sorta sad as they seemed inseparable.  Impossible to tell which one is the better half!

Happy Valentine's Day!