Oct 30

The carrots were probably the best success of the garden. I have never grown carrots as nice as these. I have been trying to decide how we were going to store them for the winter and decided to leave most of them in the ground and cover them to prevent them from freezing.

I cut the tops off to feed to the goats and then covered the rows with straw. I dug a furrow on both sides of the rows. I laid a cheap blue tarp (5' x 7') over the two double rows and pulled the dirt from the furrows onto the edges of the tarp. After the edges were covered I put soil down the middle of the rows to help hold the tarps down. I did this with four tarps and covered about 1/4th of the carrots this way. I will try to cover another 1/4th this week and dig the rest of the carrots to give away and feed to the animals.

During the winter we will be able to pull one tarp off at a time and dig the carrots. We have a problem with gofers so all I may have done is provided them a good source of food for the winter. We shall see.

The carrots on the left are Danver's and the ones on the right are Nantes. The pictures do not do them justice. Most of these are 8" to 10" long. The Nantes seem to be the most uniform with the Danver's getting to be the biggest.

These are the Nantes

Danver's