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.

Pulled up a Neat-Looking Carrot

Tricia and I spent Saturday working in the garden.  It was hard work, but enjoyable.  In my childhood, my grandmother would often give us spoons out of the silverware drawer and tell us to "go outside and dig in the dirt."  That's exactly what we did!  Tricia and I had old spoons and we worked our way down the rows, digging out oxalis.  This pervasive weed has proliferated due to some faulty information I had.  I thought it was a type of clover and that it was setting nitrogen.  I was wrong!  I left it alone and it multiplied!  Time to take it out.  We used our spoons to dig it up by the bulbs and tossed it over to the chickens who quickly devoured it.  Russ and Benjamin really helped as well.  I don't think they were quite as tired out as we were, though.

Once we removed a lot of the oxalis, we transplanted the tomato and pepper plants into the freshly cleaned out rows.  Then, in order to make room to plant green beans next weekend, we decided to pull the remaining carrots that were still in the ground.  We pulled up some beautiful purple carrots, red carrots, and of course, orange carrots.  We always pull up some strange ones, too! 

Here is one that looks like someone walking on a track or treadmill, exercising in tight orange workout pants!  Gotta get that cardio workout in, right?  We got plenty of that working in the garden.  I guess the carrots do too.

To get a proper work-out, you much stretch.  This carrot looks as if it is twisting at the torso to really stretch out the oblique muscles.

In reading more about what causes deformed or split-roots in carrots, I learned that it can be caused by rocks in the ground or compacted soil.  We don't have rocks in South Louisiana, so it can't be that.  Our garden soil has years of compost and leaves that have been amended, yielding moist, pliable soil, so it can't be that either.

The other culprit is something called root-knot nematodes.  Nematodes are invisible organisms that feed on and cause nodules to form on the roots.  I don't see any indication of that.  Finally a disease called phytoplasma aster can cause this, but it is evidenced by fuzzy roots on the carrot and often a yellow coloration.  I see none of that.

I'm unsure of what causes it, but I am sure of what we'll do with it.  We'll eat it, of course!  Our exercise carrot inspired continued exercising in the garden.