Harvesting Carrots

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Yesterday we had a very stressful day (I won’t bore you with the details), and I thought we needed a little culinary treat to restore the balance, so I harvested these:

With limited space available in my little garden there is no way I can grow carrots in quantity, so I am striving for quality instead. Because of the circumstances, I pulled these particular carrots a bit sooner than I had planned to do, but in retrospect I’m glad I did, because they seem to me to be pretty much perfect. Leaving them to get big would not necessarily have been a good move.

These ones are of the variety “Darina”, grown from seeds swapped with a friend in the Czech Republic (Hello, Dominika!). As you can see, they have come out really well – lovely and clean and with one exception, regularly-shaped.

For those of you interested in such things, the seeds for these carrots were sown on April 5th. I sowed five short rows, one each of Darina, Autumn King, Nantes, Rotin and James Scarlet intermediate.

Since then they have been growing in a raised bed, under a protective covering of Enviromesh:

Nowadays I wouldn’t attempt to grow maincrop carrots without the aid of Enviromesh. It is just so effective at keeping off the Carrot Root Fly, which can devastate a crop in next to no time. These carrots of mine have no signs at all of damage.

I’m hoping that my five varieties will all mature at different times, giving me a small but very delicious crop over quite a long period. And I hope they are all as good as these first ones!

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