In The Garden With The Carrots!

Have you ever had really good, juicy carrots? Not the kind that’s all white and dehydrated like your skin in the winter.

I mean a plump, bursting balloon of sweetness, with a few wisps of fuzzy roots and wrinkles, maybe, but a thin skin that betrays its more-orange-than-an-orange flesh?

Thankfully, I have. And it’ll never be forgotten. Granted, I can eat carrots any way, shape or form: raw, cooked, juiced, shredded or mashed — and yes, wispy and dry as my skin right now, too. But it’s a whole other level of enjoyment when the ingredient is at its prime.

It’s easy to see why carrots are such champions.They have more carotene than any fruit or vegetable. (Carotene is what the body converts to vitamin A).

And carrots are an excellent source of vitamins B, C, D, E and K, as well as calcium pectate. Calcium pectate is an extraordinary pectin fiber that has cholesterol-lowering properties.

Carrot nutritional benefits contribute to speed healing when used in raw juices. The juice contains powerful antioxidants that are extremely useful in treating illness, like cancer, anemia, high blood pressure and depression.

Carrot juice promotes the desire to eat and helps in the digestion of food.. A carrot a day keeps diarrhea away.

So the carrots and I have some good times in my garden. I simply choose short-rooted varieties, and I get a bumper crop of great looking carrots every time.

To produce those perfectly straight, long, thin roots, you ought to have a light, sandy soil enriched with lots of organic matter and deeply tilled. Unfortunately, too many of us have instead a heavy clay, full of stones.

In soil such as this, the taproots of carrots have trouble penetrating and they often end up like the ones below: stunted, distorted and forked. They can also be impossible to pull out of such soil without snapping off.

Carrots can be grown in raised beds or even in containers, where you can give them a planting medium more to their liking. But growing the long, slender varieties that look so tempting at the market may still be difficult unless your containers or raised beds are at least a foot deep.

Whether your soil is heavy or sandy, digging in plenty of finely sifted compost will make your carrots’ dreams come true: It will lighten heavy soil, and it will help sandy soil absorb and hold water better.

That’s important, because carrots grow up sweeter and less fibrous in soil that stays moist.

So, when you’re choosing carrots to grow in your garden, check the seed packet or catalog description for terms like “half long” or “baby”. These are sure to grow just fine in average garden soil.

Here are some of my favorite “half long” varieties: Nantes,  Little Finger, Danvers, Chantenay.

For those of you who don’t know, baby carrots aren’t really baby carrots. I was surprised at how many people didn’t know that when the topic came up at work the other day.

I suppose it’s an easy mistake to make – baby carrots are small, they’re sweet, and… well, they’re small. And they’re called baby. Isn’t that enough?

Baby carrots are not young carrots, but rather small pieces of carrots that are chopped and whittled down to look like small carrots.

They are large carrots that are processed by cutting them into small pieces, peeling off the healthy part (the layer closest to the skin is where all the nutrition is) and then dipping them in bleach.

Baby carrots are rinsed (not preserved) in a chlorine wash, recommended by the FDA, to kill bacteria like salmonella and E. coli, which cause food borne illness.

That’s right. We’ve all been feeding our children carrots that have been dipped in Clorox. Yum!!! I don’t even want to use Clorox in my laundry let alone eat it.

Want  to know more  about carrots? Then, click here:

Baby Carrots: Shattered Flavor & Health Benefits | Natural Health Solutions

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Yours truly, Polly – Organic Gardener

Tagged as: baby carrots, carotene, carrots