I used up the last of the fresh carrots yesterday—the last of the carrots that I planted a year ago at this time. 

There are still about 2 kilograms of frozen carrots left that should last almost until the first of this season’s carrots are ready to pick.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am about that. It’s the first time ever I’ve grown (nearly) enough carrots for the year. Usually I end up buying commercial carrots by mid-June.

We eat a lot of carrots. I have raw carrots for lunch every day, and at least half our dinners have carrots in them. We also discovered the joy of Mexican pickled carrots this year, and probably ate five kilos of them in the past two months. So a year’s supply is a whole heap of carrots! 

And if you wonder why I go to all the effort of attempting to grow a year’s supply of carrots, you have clearly never grown your own carrots. Home grown carrots put the tasteless, watery supermarket carrots to shame. Yes, they’re not as uniform in size and shape—I harvest some pretty ugly, twisted roots from my rocky garden—but their flavour (and colours) are far superior to commercially grown carrots.

I plant a wide variety of carrots. Last year I planted Paris Market, Scarlet Nantes, Touchon, Kuroda Improved, Tendersweet, and Purple Dragon. Touchon has been my workhorse carrot for years—flavourful, reliable and nicely shaped. When we moved to the rocky soil of the new property, I first tried Paris Market—a stubby round carrot I figured would be less bothered by the rocks. I wasn’t terribly excited about it at first—little carrots can be a pain to process in the kitchen, when you want a whole lot of carrot for dinner. What I didn’t know was that Paris Market carrot also has fantastic flavour for eating raw, and roasts beautifully as whole little carrot nuggets. It can also grow to a whopping size if you let it. And because of its shape, it’s easy to pick in my heavy clay soil. It’s beginning to nudge Touchon out of the top spot on my favourite carrots list.

Now that I’ve successfully grown enough carrots, my goal this year is to spread my carrot planting over a longer period, so I get just as many carrots off half the garden space, and so I don’t have 40 kilos of carrots in the fridge at any one time. 

And there’s one of the many reasons I love gardening—there’s always something new to learn, new to try. There are always tweaks and improvements to be made. A gardener can always aspire to a more productive, less weedy, less labour-intensive garden for the coming season.

Happy gardening everyone!