I’ve been watching the posts of successful gardeners up here with envious eyes as they cropped fistfuls of carrots from their vegetable plots.
I have been pulling the odd carrot here and there from my raised bed over the last month to see if there was anything much underneath the profusion of feathery green. I’ve prodded and pulled. To date, all to no avail. Up until this week all I’d found were a few pencil thin offerings.
Checking the beds a few days ago I noticed that some of the carrots were going to seed! Horrors. How could they go to seed on me without delivering as promised?
Armed with my fork I resolved to find edible carrots or else dig them all up and return the space to something more productive.
I’d sown two types from Real Seeds in the spring – the gloriously named Manchester Table carrot and the equally exotic yellow French heritage variety, Jaune D’obtuse. Surely one of them should have produced something by now.
I knew that I hadn’t thinned them very well. When the time came in early summer, something in me just baulked at pulling out young, healthy plants, and much as I understood that it was needed, I also suspected that my half-hearted attempts at thinning hadn’t been nearly rigorous enough. As such I was expecting skinny, weedy specimens at best.
My delight was complete when I delved into the forest of carrot rows and pulled up some good sized carrots.
We roasted the first of these today with beets, potatoes, onions and garlic, all grown by us. They were delicious.
It’s just a carrot. But it’s my very first homegrown one, and it tasted all the better for that.
Ravencroft Skye 