Harvesting our Biggest Carrots Ever

We are glad to see Hoophouse 3 looking really nice after being planted in lettuce last week.  This space has housed tomatoes since the spring, and although the tomatoes met an earlier end than we’d like, it was time to move on and plant late-fall lettuce.  Sometimes we agonize over needing to remove good-looking tomatoes in order to plant late lettuce, but not this year!  We’ve been discussing several strategies to improve the health of future hoophouse tomato plants.  It’s funny to say, but we’re hoping that after some changes, we do have to agonize over removing them next year.

In the carrot department, we are nearly through our ‘summer’ carrot successions.  We have a lot ready right now and they’re huge!  Potentially the largest carrots we’ve ever grown, including one we found last week that was 280 grams. Since carrots this large are somewhat unknown territory, we had some concerns that the flavour or texture would be different.  Luckily they’re still delicious.  The size makes them even easier to peel and process, so we are all making carrot soup this week!

Unfortunately, our carrot harvester broke, so it looks like we might have a big hand-harvesting job ahead of us. With carrots of this size, it was really difficult to use the harvester without breaking the roots anyway, so hand harvesting might be for the best.  We had a similar challenge last year with full-sized carrots that became extra crisp after heavy rain.

Hand-harvesting carrots isn’t a bad job to do, it just takes lots of time.  A key reason we bought this harvester is because it makes carrots efficient enough to harvest that we can grow them on a bigger scale.  It would be impossible to hand harvest the volume of carrots we plant for winter storage because we would simply never have enough time. Especially since we can use it for a few other root crops, this tool  contributes significantly to our ability to have local food available year-round.  The harvester is off for repairs very soon, but safe to say that we’re glad it’ll be fixed before our major storage harvests!