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!

Cosmic Purple Carrot Harvest

We've always planted a number of colorful vegetables - partly for the novelty, partly for the variety, and partly because we've always read that brightly colored vegetables are healthier for you.  Cosmic Purple Carrots are one of those vegetables that we harvested this weekend.  They were big and beautiful.  They probably could have been harvested a couple of weeks ago, but that's okay.  This basket was picked and put in a basket for a photo op from Mr. McGregor's garden before Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter found them.

We gave some of these to a friend at church and he thought that the carrots had crossed with my beets.  Nope, I told him.  That's just the natural color of this variety.

I pulled all the greens off and fed them to the animals waiting on the opposite side of the fence.  They were ecstatic.  The 'green-less' carrots went into a basket after washing the topsoil off of the roots, and we brought the HEAVY basket inside.

We started a big pot of water boiling.  Our goal was to cube and blanch about 3/4 of the basket and save the remaining 1/4 for eating and giving away.  The carrots are too big to chop in our chopper without first cutting into manageable chunks, so that's what I started doing.  That process exposes the big secret of Cosmic Purple Carrots:  They aren't purple through and through.  It's just the purple wrapper that is purple.  The interior is orange like any other 'normal' carrot.

Those chunks were put onto the rack of our handy chopper and POW!  The chunks are quickly transformed into little cubes.  Tricia wears ear plugs when chopping as it gets quite loud.

It doesn't take long.  In three shakes of a cottontail rabbit's tail, the first batch of carrots is cubed and ready to be blanched.  Each batch is put into boiling water.  When the water returns to a boil, we set the timer for 2 minutes.  When the timer goes off, we transfer the cubed carrots into a sink of ice water to stop the cooking process.

When the carrots have cooled, we load into quart-sized zip loc bags.  When complete, we had 10 quart bags full of carrots that will go in the freezer.

These are perfect for thawing out and steaming with fresh parsley, or putting on a baking pan and roasting or making a Cream of Carrot soup with some of LuLu's fresh milk.

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!

Making Ginger Carrots

We're blessed to have a bumper crop of carrots this year.  Today I picked a nice bucket of cosmic purple carrots and berlicum carrots, washed them up and cut the greens off and fed the greens to the cows.  Even the chickens ran to eat the carrot tops that the cows didn't immediately gobble up.

A nice haul of carrots

Since we've already blanched and frozen several bags full, we decided to make some Ginger Carrots.  These lacto-fermented vegetables are the best and a real favorite of ours.  Benjamin helped me to prep the cosmic purple carrots by slicing off the top and bottom with a sharp knife.

Once they were prepped, we put the shredding blade on the food processor and shredded all of the purple carrots, yielding 16 cups of shredded carrots.

Shredded carrots

I grated 4 tablespoons of fresh ginger.  Ginger smells so good.

Grated Ginger

I poured 16 cups of shredded carrots, 2 tablespoons grated ginger, and 8 teaspoons salt into a big plastic container.

To this I added 1/2 cup of whey.  This was whey that we separated when making kefir.

Adding whey

Next I used the wooden head of a meat tenderizer to pound the carrot mixture together in order to release the juices of the shredded carrots.

Pounding on the shredded carrots

Then I spooned the carrots into jars.

Packing into jars

Using the wooden handle of the meat tenderizer, I packed the carrots into the jar so that there was 1 inch of head-space below the rim.

The 16 cups of shredded Cosmic Purple Carrots filled four pint jars and a half pint jar.

Here is an up-close photo of the Shredded Ginger carrots.  The purple skins of the carrots give the concoction a pretty color.

Beautiful!

We put the lids and rings on tightly and we'll leave at room temperature for 2 - 3 days.  Then we'll place these in the back of the refrigerator and patiently wait for at least 3 months before we open up a jar and begin eating.  Ginger Carrots are so sweet and tangy and delicious.

They've become a favorite of ours.  Tomorrow I'll go buy some more fresh ginger and we will make some more ginger carrots with the remainder of the orange carrots.

Harvesting/Blanching Cosmic Purple Carrots

I like growing stuff with crazy colors that taste great.  Cosmic Purple Carrots fit the bill nicely.  Harvesting carrots is back breaking labor and that is why it is advantageous to have the assistance of a young Carrot Harvester with a fresh, strong back at my service.  We've received a nice bit of rain lately, so if you grab the carrots by the carrot tops and pull, the purple root pops right on up with ease.

The lush, green growth of the carrot tops always is a stark contrast to the dormant, brown grass of the pasture.  The cows take particular notice of this and we toss them all the carrot tops which they quickly consume.  Our young carrot harvester straddles the row and labors away under the cows' supervision.

Carrot Harvester

In no time at all he's more than filled a bucket with beautiful, fat Cosmic Purple Carrots.

Bucket 'o Carrots

So much was harvested that he had to stack them up on the row as they would no longer fit in the bucket. They are pretty carrots, but not near as striking as they are once you wash them.

Pile of Carrots

We don't want to wash our good topsoil down the drain, so we wash the dirt off the carrots in buckets and will pour the dirty water back in the garden.

Washin' off the dirt

Now that the majority of the dirt is washed off of them and is in the bucket below, we can take them inside.

All washed up

First, of course, we'll pull the tops off and walk over to the edge of the pasture. There's some Jersey cows that are pretty interested in them.

Nice lookin' purple carrots

I put them on the scale and found that in a very short period of time, Benjamin had pulled a little over 13 pounds of carrots from the fertile soil.  We brought a bunch of carrots to each of our neighbors and we'll eat some sliced carrots cooked in butter for lunch.  So Sweet!  But what about the rest of 'em?

Well, we'll blanch them and freeze them.  We just ran out of frozen carrots from last years' crop, so this harvest couldn't have come at a better time.  I began cutting off the very top and very bottom and slicing them into disks.  Check out the carrot on the top left of the cutting board below.  It is a double and looks like a guy with red pants on!

I had a full bowl of them sliced when I remembered that Tricia bought one of those mandolin choppers, so I pulled that out and boy, did it ever make the job go faster.  In no time I had lots of cubed carrots.  You can see how the purple carrot is only purple on the outside.  The inside is orange like a normal carrot.

Cubed Carrots

I got a big pot of water boiling and dumped the first batch of carrots into the boiling water.  Once it began to boil again, I set the timer for 2 minutes.  Once 2 minutes passed, I removed them from the boiling water and put them into a container with ice water to immediately stop the cooking process.  I let them sit until they were totally cold to the touch.

Chilling the carrots

Then I began bagging them up in quart and gallon sized freezer bags.

Bagging up the carrots

With Benjamin's morning harvest, we filled 1 gallon bag and 3 quart bags of blanched, chopped and sliced carrots.

Ready to Freeze

We'll put these in the freezer to use throughout the year.  We've found that you can just easily break off just the amount you need for a meal.  We'll continue to eat fresh carrots as long as they last, but like a squirrel with hidden acorns, it is nice to have some stored away for using later.