Well, we definitely had a banger year for our carrots this year! Probably close to 40-50 pounds harvested this year! It’s going to be some work to clean, peel and slice all of these for further preservation!
We often overgrow our carrots due to their prevalence to get eaten by voles. Despite taking precautions to keep voles out of our garden, and generally eliminating big portions of their populations, they are just too crafty and numerous to fully be free of them. This year, they got a few, but fortunately not too many!
We grow a lot of different varieties of carrots. We get tons of diversity like standard orange (e.g. Nantes), yellow, red, black, purple, white and any other type or color we can get our hands on. We’ve had some seasons where some varieties excel and others less so. And also years like this one, where everything does exceptionally well.
We’ve tried pretty much all the different storage methods for trying to keep carrots long term. Without a proper root cellar, it’s challenging. We’ve gotten to the point where we pretty much blanch & freeze most of our crop as it’s the only method we’ve found that can get us into 6 months of storage and beyond.
The key to growing a good quality carrot is 100% in the soil itself. It needs to be free of rocks and other obstacles, otherwise the carrot tends to fork off into multiple directions. It should be well draining and fairly light, pretty much like potting soil. You can also use native loamy/sandy soils, but it’s super important to get the ground free of rocks, wood chips and other large objects down to about 12 inches beneath the soil.
We’re looking forward to putting these up! From here, I’m going to go immediately peel one and scarf it down as they look absolutely delicious this year!
