Serious carrot

[gchick]

The comm's been dormant over the northern-hemisphere winter, but it's about time for things to start waking up outside.

It's a beautiful day out and I'd like to be digging in the raised beds, but they're gooey mud right now (hence the need to dig and amend and hopefully get them draining better. come to me, vermiculite, my beloved.) so maybe that's better left until things have had a little time to dry out. In the mean time, the seeds in trays are starting to show some mojo.

I got a freak crop of carrots this winter -- I planted them, I dunno, wrong last spring. Or if not wrong, then against their secret carroty desires. Anyway, they never really took off over the summer, and then in the fall they started sprouting up when I'd all but given up, and (being root veg) made it through the coldest winter we've had in ages, and when I came out of hibernation to check out the state of the patch, there they were, green as you'd like above ground, freakish and short and knobby and loaded with the kind of SERIOUS CARROT flavor you never get in a plastic bag under the surface.

Carrots straight out of the ground are one of those archetypal garden things for me. The line from dirt to growing to food is so direct, plus, well, yum. So getting a bonus bunch of them when I wasn't expecting to find anything but cleanup is extra-fabulous.

(And now back to dealing with the mud.)

Comments

[writinginct]

I can't wait to get back outside. Last weekend was so nice, I spent a lot of time out on the deck cycling soil in my perennial pots. I started a bunch of herb seeds a couple of days ago too. I think I have cabin fever. lol

I decided to focus on my herbs and tea making this year. I buy so much tea, it would be so much more satisfying to grow the stuff I like and dry it. And nothing beats filling up my spice jars with freshly harvested and dried herbs.

[gchick]

Ooh, very cool - all my herbs are for cooking, so I just don't know the tea/medicinal varieties nearly as well. What are you growing? (And what's your favorite drying method?)

[writinginct]

I only have a small area (my deck primarily) to work with as the rest of the yard gets absolutely no sun. But last year I had a wonderful harvest of thyme, parsley, scallions, rosemary, and basil. That's not counting all the flowers in addition. I have an album on Photobucket taken of my deck garden about 1/3 of the way through the growing season. By fall I had probably 5x as many plants and there wasn't any room to be had anywhere. It was a really good year.

I'm a big fan of Tazo Tea, the "Calm" variety, but it's wicked expensive. I had already planned on adding chamomile to my plant list for this year, then I looked at the actual ingredients for the Tazo Calm: chamomile, blackberry leaves, lemongrass, rose petals, spearmint leaves, lemon balm leaf, hibiscus flowers, lavender, marigold. The hibiscus is the only thing I'm not keen on, I've never grown it before, but the rest I've either already got started from seed or will buy starter plants later on. So we'll see.

I had a simple Nesco Snackmaster dehydrator that finally croaked at the end of last year after many years of use. I'm honestly thinking about just getting the same thing. Space-wise it works for me and I like the flexibility of being able to choose how many trays I want to use.