December Harvest

Instead of writing a length the details of my absence again, I think I'll just admit flat out that now that it's the holiday season and we keep having family in town and life is just so busy, I am finding it hard to keep up with everything. Since something has to suffer, it's bound to be the blog. Luckily not much is going on in the garden, so I haven't had much to report.

Until today.

Today I decided we'd harvest one row of radishes and half a row of carrots. I did a craptacular job of thinning the carrots so I knew we'd get some funky looking roots on those things. I know that next time I do carrots I'll do a raised bed so I can assure the soil won't be too hard packed and weird for them to grow down.

The boys were fascinated with picking the radishes. I think they were as shocked as I was that we actually grew something that looked like it was supposed to look. We have two rows of radishes and we pulled up one row. We didn't do both rows because I have no idea what on earth I'll do with these radishes since it's not really salad weather right now. Although my friend Courtney sent me a very yummy sounding radish recipe that I'll try out with this bunch and report back with the scoop.


We brought the carrots and radishes inside and cleaned them up to put in the fridge. I've heard that you can eat radish greens and carrot greens, but it didn’t sound too appealing to me. When I'd trimmed them up I went out front and tossed the leftovers into the front yard. I assume some deer or rabbits will enjoy them tonight. Our front yard is like a Motel 6 for deer. Often when Farmer B returns home in the wee hours of the morning he counts up to 20 sleeping deer curled up on our front yard fast asleep.



My carrots do look a bit weird and they all have sunburning. Living in Florida I expect to have to put sunscreen on everything to prevent sunburning, but who knew it related to carrots as well? I read that sunburning causes green tops on the carrots and an off flavor and dark green pieces in the cooked product. You're supposed to cut away the green portion and use the rest of the root. When the tops are healthy, sunburning can be avoided by pulling a small amount of loose soil up to the row when the roots are swelling (about 40 to 50 days after planting). I suppose that makes sense. The tops are exposed so it does make sense to pile loose soil on top. Lesson learned.