Carrots

I have one main bed of carrots that I've been slowly harvesting from. But on Saturday night the temps will drop and I'm thinking this will be the winter freeze. We have had freezes before and the ground did freeze once this fall, but we had warms spells after that thawed things out. After the first frost I uncovered my carrots. I was thinking the carrot flies were gone for the year (they were) and letting the carrots see some frosts and freezes makes them sweeter. This bed had two varieties. I had Mokum in three 7' rows, and SugarSnax in four rows. The SugarSnax usually produces much more than Mokum, but I think they needed a bit more sun in the fall to really size up a lot. I did get some nice ones though.

I did have one small test patch in the end close to the fence. I wanted to see if they could produce anything. This section really doesn't get a lot of sun at all in the fall. Even early fall. But it never hurts to try. Part of the bed had some cover crop planted. It also used to have the flowering bunching onions. So there was onion seed in the soil too. Both carrots and onions were coming up at the same time. The carrots were not covered. I sowed very thinly so I wouldn't have to thin. With that and the onions I had my fingers crossed about the carrot flies. It turns out I did get a little carrot fly damage, but not a lot. Not nearly as much as last fall. However I didn't get many carrots from the bed and those I did get were mostly tiny.

These are all the carrots pulled. the ones on top are the SugarSnax and the ones on the bottom are Mokum. The ones to the right are the Mokums pulled from the test bed. The number of Mokums from the main bed is deceptive. It looks like so much less than the SugarSnax, but I did pull mostly from the Mokums over the fall for my fresh carrots. So I expected them to be less.

You can see my biggest carrot there near the rebar. The rebar is 2' long. So the carrot is about 10". Last year my biggest carrot was 11" maybe even 12". Last year I got about 30 pounds of fall carrots. I wish I could compare to this year's 18 lbs. But I'm not sure how much space the carrots took up last year. They were scattered. Most of the harvestable ones came from my circle garden (with great sun) and the carrots there were huge. I had about half of that in carrots. But I also had lots of other little spots. I think I was really carrot hungry last year.

So all in all I'm happy with the carrot harvest. It wasn't stellar, but it was good. And I have over 100lbs of other orange veggies (squash and sweet potatoes) to eat up this year. So I wouldn't feel the lack even if the harvest was even lower this year.

Tomorrow I'll get out and put some compost over the bed. I'm growing Asian greens here in the spring so the bed has to be up and ready quickly. I might even pound in my rebar for the hoops before the ground freezes. That way I can cover it early and get the ground unfrozen fast for spring.