Finished with the Fall Carrots

It's March 7th, and it is warming up.  It feels like summer already with mid-day temps hitting 83 already.  What that means is I have to get moving!  Warmer temps means the cabbage all needs to be harvested.  If you don't, the snails will wreak havoc on the heads - nasty critters, I tell you.  I harvested all of the heads, except for three.  I have one big bin of cabbage heads in the outdoor fridge.  I see coleslaw, homemade egg rolls, cabbage/sausage jambalaya (yum - I call it deconstructed cabbage rolls), cooked cabbage and yes, jars of sauerkraut in the near future.

Then there is yet another row of carrots.  We harvested the first row a couple of weeks back.  We've been roasting them in the oven and using them to dip into homemade radish dip (finely chopped radish, cream cheese, garlic and other seasonings.  This second row of carrots must come up today.  They're already too big.  The soil is soft and they are easy to pull, so let's get this show on the road.

Halfway through and I filled up a plastic bin.  All of the beautiful tops were thrown over the fence to hungry cows and goats that greedily gobble the greens down.  See those carrots?  They are mighty dirty.  This is a perfect time to try out the garden sink.  I spent the morning working on the sink.  Unfortunately, the hard freeze in late January - early July played a number on the plumbing to the garden sink, breaking the head to the sprayer.  We'll try out the sink to see if it works once we get that second row of carrots pulled.

I filled both sinks with water and everything seems to be working nicely.  I'll let the carrots sink in order to clean them up and wash off all the topsoil.  I'm catching it all in a tub beneath the drain.  I'll also use a vegetable scrubber to get the carrots super clean before bringing them inside.

And here we go: Two tubs of terrific tubers.  How's that for alliteration?  These will be stored in the outdoor fridge as well.  I plan on putting these up, blanching and freezing them, canning them, and making Ginger Carrots (sort of a carrot sauerkraut - cool and tangy)!

It's good to have the carrots and cabbage harvested.  That frees up room to plant sweet corn and okra as well as the tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings that I'll be transplanting from our seed starting trays in about another week.