The deer around here have discovered my gardens, and have been nibbling on things. They especially like carrot tops, and have been pulling some of the carrots up with the tops, sooooo, I decided that I needed to harvest the carrots.
This year, I grew the greens on the south side of the house, so that I could use all the troughs behind the garden shed. We planted red, purple (the original color of carrots), and orange carrots back in mid-August. We haven’t gotten a lot of rain in the interim, so I had to water them pretty diligently, especially at the beginning. They are notoriously difficult to get to sprout, but watering every day got the job done.
I pulled all but one trough, which happens to be the one pictured above because the carrots weren’t ready. I pulled all of them and put them in the wheel barrow. I brought my plastic basket into the potting shed and a sharp knife and cut all the tops off of the carrots, and threw the tops into the woods.
Then I did a rough wash with the garden house outside because the basket has holes in it. Then I brought them into the house and dumped them into my huge farm sink in the laundry room
From here, I washed them, and trimmed the little roots at the bottom and bagged them up into gallon size zip lock bags.
It ended up being 41 lbs. of carrots. I had hoped for about 30, so they well exceeded my expectations, and there’s still one trough to harvest. These carrots should last several months in the fridge stored this way. I hope that they don’t last that long because they are taking up almost one whole shelf in my butler’s pantry fridge.
Fortunately, our family really loves carrots, especially roasted carrots–which go so fast. I will regularly do 6 or 7 lbs. of roasted carrots, and we only have a few leftover when everyone is here.
I found that the orange carrots (Nantes) were the most productive, so I probably will only plant those next year.
Cathy At Home on the River 