Yes, carrots!

Freshly harvested Nelson carrots

Just-rinsed carrots in the soft light of an overcast day: beautiful every time! Some veggies look particularly good without trying… These are freshly pulled Nelson, at a pretty fair size but not yet fully mature, from our fourth planting of the season. Every year so far, I’ve put in at least four, sometimes five plantings in succession, and we rarely see really fat, full-sized carrots. This has worked well for CSA and farmers’ market: our carrots are freshly harvested every week, never from storage, and at a versatile size, always perfect for eating raw and usually big enough for convenient cooking as well. Today’s haul, bundled and laid out for rinsing on the long screen table, will be heading into CSA share bags in just a minute, for pick-up this afternoon…

Carrots, rinsed and bundled

16 thoughts on “Yes, carrots!”

  1. We grew Nelsons this year ours were not even close to half the size of yours! The CSA we belonged to did not offer carrots if they would have the bundles would have been less than half the bundle size you have there.

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  2. I’ve chosen you for the Honest Scrap Award. If you want to participate you can check out my post today or if you aren’t into memes, feel free to ignore it.

    -Nathan

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  3. None of those will entered into a “Weirdest Looking Veg” competition like so many of their forked cousins across the country! Beautiful sight – your soil must be excellent to grow such fine specimens.

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  4. Like I said, plain old freshly washed carrots are a crowd pleaser, even in photos! :) Thanks!!

    Nathan: I really appreciate the Honest Scrap Award. I’m not ignoring it, but I’ve never followed up these meme awards, because I can never figure out which blogs to pick! So I love getting them, but I don’t pass them on, so I don’t feel right displaying them on the site… What a mess! :)

    Jamie: We don’t deliberately pull carrots before they’re mature, we just plant often through the season, and dig them up as we go. Each planting lasts about 4 weeks, sometimes running out just as the next one is ready, other times overlapping, depending on growing conditions. Slow-growing years like this, the new beds haven’t matured when we start digging them, so the first ones may be smaller and they get bigger from week to week. It’s all about the (crazy) weather! For our customers, I think fresh eating carrots are what they mostly want, so this works out. Ideally, we’d also have full-size storage carrots grown separately for fall harvest. Some years we’ve done this, but not this year.

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