Garden Digest

Daucus carota sativus

When you're an untrained gardener, you can find out very quickly that you don't always know what to do with an abundance of produce once you yank it out of the ground. This little gardening dilemma reminds me of our very first foray into planting, many years back, when we ended up with the perennial gardener's gift that just keeps giving, cucumbers – ten, twenty, thirty at a time, all ripe and just asking to be used, not wasted.  At that point, we had yet found that we liked cucumber water, so we stockpiled cucumber salad to the point where we were beginning to see green.

The opposite became true with my first attempt with carrots.  In this case, I already knew the more the better – I completely loved the taste and texture of roasted carrots and the kids asked for them raw all the time.  I could eat a side of soft butter roasted Imperator-style (long and slender) carrots anytime, anyplace...add a dice of garlic, maybe a splash of lemon, brown sugar, even orange juice.

Carrots, though, as the seed package suggested, need deep, rich, loose, easy-draining soil...difficult to find in many of our local clay and ridge line backyards.  So I chose a three foot box to plant in, loosely soiled with added nutrients.  Reduced to such a small space to plant, I felt like Bugs Bunny and got a little greedy I wanted my own steady supply of roasted carrots so badly. I over-indulged on the suggested seed spacing, packing them in tight rows too close together.  This became obvious once some of the seedlings started to sprout so I thinned them out, as suggested.  To no real avail.  The poor little five-inchers were eventually harvested (all three tiny batches!), and heck, they did

taste good, but it dawned on me that there are as many little tricks of the trade in gardening as any other trade or art.  To get my pan full of oven roasted foot-long carrots, next time this green thumb might have to head to the grocery store.