While my wife was in Colorado this last week visiting her family her parents and she dug up some carrots her dad had overwintered. If you grow carrots and happen to overwinter them during a mild winter, next to the foundation on the south side of the house they will apparently keep growing over the winter. This is a little bit foreign to me because I don’t overwinter carrots – the climate in Tucson means that we sow, grow, and harvest carrots throughout the winter season. They live in Grand Junction, which does happen to have a little less snow than up in the mountains of Colorado. I’ll have to let you know how they taste. My wife jokingly said they’ll probably taste like winter.
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| Overwintered Scarlett Nantes from Grand Junction, CO |
Update: I am happy to report that these carrots turned out to be very sweet. We baked them for dinner one night last week. You know kids like vegetables when they happily eat them up.
These carrots look huge :-)
ReplyDeleteI think over wintered carrots are always a treat. When my kids were young, they always thought it was amazing to find them in the cold barren garden.
ReplyDeleteI am glad to hear about your family's experience with these carrots. I was afraid they may not taste good.
DeleteI just overwintered some carrots purely by accident. I have a large raised bed in my back yard. Last fall, I was too lazy to dig up some teeny-tiny carrots that were in there, thinking they'd just turn to compost during the winter and it wasn't worth the bother of taking them out. Yesterday I went outside to begin to prepare that bed for some early spring plantings and I found those carrots had grown and were, in fact, ready for harvest. What a delight! A couple of them had rotted, but I got about twelve nice carrots. Remember, they were so tiny in the fall that there weren't worth pulling up. So we had our first garden vegetables of the spring, on March break, in Canada, zone 5a. It is not time to plant carrots yet, so if I hadn't overwintered these (by accident) then I'd not have any fresh ones for months! Yes, they are sweeter than normal. Also, they needed to be peeled: the outer part was just a bit tough. But so worth it. I'll be doing this on purpose now! I hope you enjoyed trying your wife's family's overwintered carrots!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the comment. I am glad that you had such good success with your carrots.
DeleteI just updated my post. The carrots were very sweet and delicious!