Saturday, November 20, 2010

Goliath Carrots

I believe I mentioned many bad things about the garden over the summer. Once food started coming in I forgot to post what was going right.

Right now I am simmering down the last big batch of tomatoes to make sauce for lasagna tomorrow night. I managed to bring in all the plants loaded with green tomatoes before the frost and they have been slowly ripening up ended in our basement. There are a few still down there and I have my fingers crossed for Christmas. Also waiting for Christmas...on a whim I planted our 'left over' tomato and pepper plants against a wall pretty much in the yard. I then promptly forgot about them so they were never watered or weeded. Apparently they just wanted to grow and the day before the frost I rediscovered them and they are sitting in a sunny window in my house. There will be at least 3 hot peppers ready for Christmas salsa.

Other than the stuff we recently brought in, I don't actually know what we had for a harvest. However, we have plenty of jars of tomato sauce, zucchini pickles, green beans and other wonderfulness in the basement. We got maybe 15 lbs of sweet potatoes that are simple marvelous and even with the diseases running rampant we managed to bring in 4 pumpkins and 4 butternut squash (both of which ended up in the pumpkin cookies from the last post.

At this point all that is left in our garden are the carrots and the parsnips. These crops can handle the cold just fine and their tops are still the same green shade they have been all summer. Apparently this extra time in the soil is REALLY good for carrots. Allow me to illustrate with part of tonight's dinner:



The 3 carrots on the left are my rainbow carrots -orange, ruby, and yellow in this case- and the one on the right is one of our "normal" orange carrots.

When I pulled up the monster carrot we figured it wouldn't be any good but it is perfectly carrot flavored and textured. It is actually way more carrot flavored and crunchy than supermarket carrots so it is definitely a win. And....we still have like 40 this size in the ground.


Now for dinner.
-Jenn

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