We got a nice mention in the Organic in the Miami Valley blog about our carrots and the 2012 Farm Share Initiative. Take a look

2010 Carrots

We grow carrots and find they do much better if planted in the summer and harvested in the fall. Spring planted carrots tend to be small, bitter and full of carrot maggot damage. Not something we want to sell , nor people want to buy and eat. But the fall carrots tend to be huge, sweet and virtually damage free.

This summer/fall we had a drought which meant no rain for months on end (okay 2 months but still plural) so the carrots had to be hand watered (we did not put irrigation drip tape on the beds for some reason-I think because it was so hot and humid and so many other things had to be irrigated that it simply did not get done). In August we were quite certain, even with being watered by hand 3x to 4x a week that the carrots, at best, would be small, woody roots with bad flavor. That all the work we were doing (this hand watering took two of us about 4 hours a day to do and that was in addition to of all the other chores one must do to keep a market farm up and working) was likely to be for naught.

So we were surprised when in October Eugene started digging the carrots and they were marvelous-large, colorful roots with great flavor (that got better and better the colder it got). And since they were planted in summer and during a drought there was virtually no insect damage (likely due to the fact the maggot flies that lay eggs on the roots which hatch into nasty carrot maggots which in turn make tunnels through the top 1/3 of the carrots, quit breeding due to lack of water). By colorful I mean exactly that-we grow several colors of carrots in addition to the classic orange. As a matter of fact we grow 3 other colors, red, white (which is really a light yellow or ivory color) and yellow. The varieties are Yellowstone (yellow), Purple Haze (red) nelson and Bolero (orange) and White Satin (white, d'uh!). I find the white and yellow carrots have the best taste of the 4 colors-they are the sweetest.

We also discovered that the white and yellow carrots are the most drought tolerant of the 4 colors we grow. They really did not care that they were water starved, they got big and beautiful despite hardship. The red carrots, on the other hand, did not respond well at all to the drought. The survivors (we estimate that at least 50% either did not germinate at all or died young) were small but do have great flavor. The orange varieties did okay in spite of the drought but would have done much much better had we had average rainfall and did not get quite as big as the yellow and white varieties.

In the end, we harvested and cleaned around 150 pounds (plus another 200+ pounds already dug and sold) on Thursday and Friday of this past week. Had we not had a drought we would have gotten at least 4x that amount from 8 50' x 4' beds

The Fall Carrot Crop

The past two days have been all about carrots. Monday we spent the day digging 4 beds of carrots, removing the tops, getting off the excess mud and putting them into crates. The weather was cool and cloudy with occasional sunny breaks which were very nice as the sun warmed us up. Otherwise we were cold.

Tuesday afternoon was spent washing the carrots. It was a lot warmer Tuesday than it was Monday and sunny to boot. So the job was not too bad, though getting soaked from the waist down in 50F weather is not exactly my idea of fun. But it was certainly more fun than doing this job in 45F or colder weather.

The mud did not want to come off the roots but with enough water pressure any thing is possible and I ended up with 7 full crates of field washed carrots. Field wash means 99% of the dirt is off of them but they are not 100% clean.

We have a primitive wash station. It consists of a hose and a metal stand to put a crate on. Oh, and I use empty dirty crates to put crates full of dirty carrots on so they are not directly on the ground (keeps things sanitary and also keeps slugs from crawling into the crates and eating holes in the carrots). What I do is first spray down the crates full of dirty carrots to get the dirt on them wet. This is a kin to soaking them. Than I grab a full crate of wet, dirty roots and dump about 1/6th of the contents (maybe 10 pounds) into the cleaning crate (which is any empty crate that is on the metal stand) and spray the carrots off, making sue to roll them around so all surfaces are washed. Than I dump them into a clean crate for storage. Repeat that about 40 times and you have 7 crates of clean carrots ready to be bagged up for sale.

It's a good thing we dug the carrots when we did. They were all harvested because we were under the impression that it was going to get really cold and start snowing. At least that was the forecast 5 days out for this week. As it has turned out it will rain today and it will dip below freezing at night from here on out but it looks like we will not get 12"+ of snow nor will the soils freeze up any time soon (like in the next 10 days). But despite the lack of winter we are finding a lot more damage on the carrots vs the last time we harvested them, about 10 days ago. Up until this final carrot harvest I would say the damaged carrots made up less than 1% (and some weeks there was zero damage). But this batch had around 5% damage, mainly from slugs, though a few carrot tops were chewed off by mice or bunnies. 5% is not bad at all for damage. The summer carrots had around 50% damage from mice and voles and carrot maggots. The summer carrots also were not nearly as big and beautiful nor did they have the wonderful sweet flavor of these fall beauties.

But as I was saying, it is good we got these carrots out when we did because I believe we would have seen a lot more damage from the slugs and mice had we left them in another 5 to 7 days. It was obvious to us that the critters are getting hungry and would have started dining on the carrots in earnest very soon. But now the carrots are safely put away out of the reach of the vermin and ready to be sold to SW Ohio and EC Indiana Locavores and distributed to our farm share members

Early September

Some farm photos for your enjoyment. These were taken throughout the day Friday Sept 4th

Tomato plants

Some of the winter squash harvest. Cushaws, delicata, butternut, acorn and sunshine.

Ugly radishes. sweet and hot.

Rainbow carrots

Sunflower

Sunflower being pollinated by a native bee

More sunflowers

Beetles on a sunflower

Purple peppers