Spring Carrots
Yes, really!
Carrots are one of the delights of the early spring garden. When the sorrel and parsley are only just starting to unfurl a few leaves, when it’s still too early to plant much of anything, carrots are bured treasure.
Last summer I planted two varieties of carrot: Yaya and Tendersweet. Tendersweets are undeniably delicious, but they have an aggravating tendency to snap off halfway down when harvested from my heavy clay soil. The Yayas are easier, although I do still need to loosen the soil around them with a dandelion fork and then gently ease them up, using the fork to hopefully get under the carrot rather than into it. Yayas are a shortish carrot that doesn’t get much longer than 5 or 6 inches, which makes this easier.
The wonderful thing about carrots and several other root crops, like beets and parsnips, is the way they respond to cold weather. They convert the starches inside them to sugars like glucose, fructose, and sucrose, which lower the freezing point of the water they’re dissolved in. This keeps the liquid inside the root from crystallizing, which would burst the cells open and turn them to mush. Usually, I harvest carrots in November after a few nights of frosty weather.
Last year, I didn’t get around to harvesting carrots that month, and heavy snows that stayed on the ground all winter meant I couldn’t harvest then either. That snow turned out to be a blessing, at least in regard to carrots, because it insulated the soil during the weeks on end when the temperature plunged below zero overnight. The carrot’s strategy of boosting its sugar content does have a limit, so I was expecting to lose last year’s carrot crop because of my negligence.
Surprise! When the snow finally melted, I found a bunch of healthy looking carrots with their tops peeking above the soil.
When I got them up out of the ground, I found some very strange looking carrots. If grown in nitrogen-rich soil, carrots have a tendency to develop forked roots, which is only exacerbated by all the little rocks in my garden. This summer, I will make a point of planting carrots where the last vegetable I grew was a heavy nitrogen feeder like squash or greens, and not adding any extra fertilizer. I use feather meal and chicken manure in my vegetable garden to boost the nitrogen content in what was originally very nitrogen-poor soil after it grew lawn grass for many years.
Some rutabagas also caught my eye, and I harvested them along with the carrots. Alas, the rutabaga roots had decided to grow mostly above the soil level, and although their flavor was good, their texture was too grainy to make a gourmet treat. The carrots, though, are outrageously delicious—sweet, crisp, juicy and carroty. Next year, I’ll make an effort to harvest carrots in November, because seriously cold weather could ruin the crop if it’s not protected by a deep enough snow cover.
But what a treat in a season when the garden is not yet producing very much!
Do you grow carrots? What’s your favorite variety?