I went to the Potager to cut Broccoli for dinner and noticed a carrot had gone to seed. I went over to pull it out, and started pulling up more. These were the Kaleidoscope carrots I had planted back in March.
So colorful! (The two orange ones on the right are Danvers half-longs)
I scrubbed them well because I hear that the skin has a lot of nutrients and I didn't want to peel them.
(See how that one little carrot grew around the bigger one! Isn't that funny?)
The purple ones were orange inside. If I had peeled them, they would just have been orange, like regular carrots.
The carrots steamed with broccoli. A yummy, healthy, fresh from the garden side dish.
I'm not sure if carrots are worth the time and space they take when organic carrots are so inexpensive at the grocery store, but I've never seen purple, white, yellow and red-orange carrots at the store. That's reason enough to grown Kaleidoscope Carrot Mix!
I had those in my garden this year also! I had never planted carrots before, for the same reasons you list and also because "spring" crops are very iffy here (this year we hit the high 90's and low 100's for 3 weeks in May and June, went down to the 80's for a bit and now back up there again). But these carrots did well, for here. I picked the last of them last week. I saved the tops and made a "Tuscan Carrot Top Soup", which . . . was not that great. I roasted the carrots themselves, which was wonderful.
ReplyDeleteI planted mine along 2 edeges of one of my raised beds, so they didn't take up much room in the beds themselves. I'll probably plant a second crop of them in mid or late July (under my new shade cloth).