Carrots

We do gardening in bursts here.  Mostly, we neglect things.  But weekly or bi-weekly we try to pull something up or hack something down that shouldn't be growing.  This gardening strategy has worked extremely well for our yard.  When we find a plant that we like, a plant that seems to be growing well where it has been planted, we leave it alone, and occasionally cut down the competition.  If we leave it alone long enough, it will go to seed, and then the next year we have even more of that type of happy plant.  And soon the happy plants take over the entire garden in an impressive way, and the neighbors compliment us and ask us what our gardening secrets are.

 

This is how we came to have a front garden full of hollyhocks.  And an expanding raspberry patch in the back yard.  And a vegetable garden overrun with green onions, red chard, leaf and butter lettuce, and this year, carrots.  

Last year we planted a few carrot seeds, but only a handful grew into carrot plants.  The carrots were difficult to dig up, and once dug up, they tasted like... well... carrots.  Which means that somewhere in the heat of mid-summer the carrots weren't worth digging anymore.  So we neglected the remnants.  And then one of the carrot plants did something interesting.  It grew huge stalks, and big clusters of little white flowers.  And the bees loved the flowers, so I wasn't going to cut them down at that point.  And before we knew it, we had carrot seeds scattered all across the vegetable garden.  

This spring, to our happy surprise, there were many little carrot plants growing up around the red chard, lettuce, and green onions.  I thinned a little in one of my gardening bursts, and then abandoned all gardening during the months of June and August, and spent my gardening time in July picking fruit instead of worrying about the vegetable garden.  

But last week, I realized the vegetable garden was overgrown, and it was time to pick the carrots.  

So I spent two hours today digging them up, and after pulling about 2/3 of them, the carrot harvest covered my kitchen counter. 

Carrots!  Who knew?  How fun!  Except they still taste like... well... carrots.  

What are we going to do with all these carrots?

Dancing carrots from my garden.