Just in time! It wouldn’t be a Frosty Garden growing season if we weren’t harvesting at least something out of the snow. Fortunately, it’s our very last “essential” crop harvest of the year, carrots!
Harvesting carrots is a timely venture up north. We want to ensure they get as much exposure to cooler temperatures as possible, as this is what makes for a lovely sweet carrot. On the flip side, however, we can’t wait too long as once the soil freezes solid, it can be difficult to extract the carrots.
At lower latitudes, it’s quite popular to overwinter carrots in the ground. In this state, they will keep for a very long time. This works for lower latitude growers, but our ground quickly becomes a solid block of ice given our frequent temperature dives down to below zero temperatures. Simply put, we have to fully harvest our crop.
We grow a lot of carrots, they’re one of our most valuable winter vegetables. We reserve a good number of our carrots for fresh eating. Typically we store them in the refrigerator crisper drawer, where we can get a good couple months of storage time. We think of this stash as our “short term supply.” For the remainder of the harvest, though, we’ve opted to blanch and freeze.
For those blanch and freeze carrots, we generally peel and slice them into coin shaped pieces. These are then blanched, dried and frozen. This process sets up our “long term supply” of carrots. Even though carrots can last a pretty decent amount of time with the right storage methods, only freezing can get you into the “year plus” range.
Getting a subarctic garden to feed you, year round, takes a number of creative approaches. Sometimes people don’t “get” why we blanch so much food. The reason is long term storage. This food will still be feeding us through the next growing season. But, we also take advantage of crops that last a good amount of time when given proper storage techniques.
We’re very glad that we wrapped up our final harvests today. We get the sense that winter is here to stay. Though brief blips above freezing are still expected in the next week or so, we’re getting to the point where the white stuff just isn’t going to recede. Looks like we’ve got a eight to nine month winter ahead of us!
We’ve still got a backlog of posts that we’ll be covering, so much has happened in the last month or so! I think we’re also going to do a deeper dive into carrots, to celebrate this wonderful harvest, too! So, you can likely look forward to another week or two worth of posts from us this season!
