Possibly one of the world's great inventions is the carrot.
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I say "invention" because the ancestor of our carrots was a tough, spindly purple or white root. It took Dutch market gardeners plus royal patronage to provide the sweet, crunchy, lusciousness we know today.
A carrot is possibly the world's most versatile veg. You can scoop up hommus with carrot sticks; sauté carrots with garlic and onion as a sweet base for soups and stews; boil them in a little water and maple syrup; grate and add to dumplings; slice thinly for spring rolls; make one of the world's best soups just with carrot, potato and a good stock; roast carrots with a leg of lamb; make carrot halva or carrot cake for dessert, or carrot muffins for breakfast.
What other veg can be in every course for dinner as well as a pre- or post-dinner snack, or be used to bribe a horse to come to the gate, or a wombat to stop chewing up the doormat? Carrots are also essential if you want to bribe Santa's reindeer or the Easter bunny to make sure you're left a good haul.
If you are cutting down the grocery bills, grow carrots. Dig up the lawn for a veggie garden, and you'll never have to mow the blasted thing again.
First step: what variety of carrot? There are at least 50 commercially available. I love the various round ones - especially if glazed with a little honey at the last minute. The red, yellow, white and purple ones look spectacular on a platter if roasted whole, still with some of their tops on, with a few orange carrots for contrast, but coloured carrots are really for the gourmet who tastes with their eyes.
The sweetest, most flavourful and tenderest carrots are the orange ones. Choose long varieties if you have loamy soil or have dug your garden bed well, or mini carrots or round ones if you practice no dig gardening. Carrots will force their way down - it is hard to stop a determined carrot - but will also grow upwards with a slightly bitter top. Carrots are one veg that really does respond well to classic "dig deep, wait three weeks for the weeds to germinate, then dig again" style of gardening.
Sow carrot seed at any warm time of the year till autumn, that is, from now to March. Carrot seed is small, and unless you collect your own from a non-hybrid variety gone to seed, relatively expensive.
Smooth out the soil before you plant carrots, otherwise the seed may all wash together. It is very hard to sow carrot seed thinly and evenly - you often get great clumps - and usually too many carrots close together. Try mixing the carrot seed with dry sand, or even dry tea leaves. This keep away ants as well.
Cover the carrot seed with the finest possible sprinkling of soil or compost - no great clumps that will smother it. Water often and lightly - if you water too hard you'll wash the seed away - and if you don't water the thin layer of soil will dry out and kill your young carrot shoots.
Weed! Young carrots are tiny and timid and easily overcome. Feed well, but with a good organic mix - if carrots get too much nitrogen you get lush bushy tops and not much carrot.
Carrots actually do best where the ground has been well-manured for a previous crop like lettuce or celery, so the carrots themselves don't need much feeding. But don't fret if you don't have a bed of recently picked lettuce or celery handy.
Water at least twice a week, unless it keeps on raining. Make sure your garden bed is well drained, that is, doesn't form puddles, or your carrots may rot or crack if waterlogged.
Start picking you carrots as soon as they are big enough to bother with - so, baby carrots. Keep picking until they begin to go to seed in spring. After that the core will become tough and tooth-breaking.
Carrots going to seed is the sign that you need to plant more carrot s- and one good planting will last a year, as long as you plant a lot of them. Even if you love supermarket carrots, will find a hundred other uses with home grown ones.
THIS WEEK I AM:
- Planting lemon seeds, from an old variety that tolerates frosts. Humans are happier and healthier with green growth around them.
- Plant something every week - even if it's just the seeds from your lunchtime mandarin. If everybody did that we'd all have flowers by the armful and food dripping off the trees wherever we looked - and Australia would have a very different idea of food security.
- Cutting back the agapanthus, which looked glorious this year but which the hail badly battered;
- Celebrating our first big bunch of bananas. We've had small bunches with small tasteless bananas before. These are real bananas;
- Delighting in our first really big crop of passion fruit, too. It seems that both bananas and passion fruit like hot dry springs then wet summers;
- Trying to keep up with the zucchini, which are particularly delicious this year. Normally zucchini are fairly tasteless. These are firm and sweet.
- Picking liliums that have suddenly decided they will bloom after all the rain.