We’ve done really well for carrots this year. On Saturday afternoon, determined to get the plot emptied by the end of February, I dug up the last of the crop and separated them into two camps: good for eating, and good for chickens.
The results were pretty impressive. The good for eating pile filled a washing up bowl (above), despite the fact that I was being quite picky and only saving the best of the best. The good for chickens pile filled a good part of a trug, and represented all of those vegetables that had been half eaten by the slugs. Some of them were truly impressive and far larger than anything you’d find in the shops. One of them, the one on the top of the pile in the picture below, you couldn’t even get your fingers around.
Of course, this is good news for both camps. We get to eat lots of nice carrots, and so do the chickens, and even then we benefit from their share. The more vegetables they have in their diet, the more vivid yellow and tasty their yolks, so it’s a win all round.
Now I just need to get peeling and blending to turn our portion into carrot and coriander soup.
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They look lovely. Its always a bit sad though pulling up the last of something. Lucky for us one of the dogs had dug over the carrot patch during the summer so a few surprise roots have shown themselves as ‘bonus carrots’ recently. I was pleasantly surprised.
I’ve never managed to get carrots to grow in our clay soil (although the farmer in the field next to us seems to manage).
I’ve just finished making carrot and almond chutney, which at least means your carrots can live on in sandwiches for a while.
When you get below our good top soil, we have a lot of clay at the bottom of our plot and if we dig the carrots up at the right time we have found them to usually be pretty good. Have you tried growing them in large pots in a mixture of earth and sand? That way they will benefit from better drainage.
Large pots sounds like a good tip, I may give that a try.