When (or if) to harvest carrots
Last
week, I mentioned carrots on my soon-to-harvest list, and a couple of you rightly
pointed out that you don't have to harvest carrots before the
frost. In fact, carrots get sweeter if you wait to dig them until
cold weather has moved in, and some people even leave their carrots in
the ground over the winter. However, there are some reasons you
might choose to harvest your carrots early.
If you get a heavy layer
of snow that stays put all winter long, you're in the perfect spot for
overwintering carrots. Counterintuitively, the snow protects the
ground so it doesn't freeze and the garden row acts just like a good
root cellar. Those of us who garden further south, though,
experience ground freezes and thaws throughout the winter months, and
each freeze-thaw cycle pushes the carrots a bit further out of the
ground. The tops quickly freeze and then rot, so you can't count
on carrots overwintering in our area.
You can get around this
issue by mulching
the carrots heavily in the fall. However, if your
ground doesn't freeze, varmints are very likely to move into that soft,
warm bed and nibble on your roots all winter long. Which brings
me to one of the reasons I'm harvesting my carrots early this year: a
vole found the tasty carrots in one bed and started gnawing off the
bottoms, so I decided to get those roots before they're all eaten up.
The other reason I'm
harvesting now has to do with maturity of the carrots. In order
to overwinter carrots in the garden, you need to plant them at just the
right time so they're fully mature just as the ground gets too cold for
them to grow any further. This is very tricky since you never
know if autumn will be cold and dark or warm and sunny, so I tend to
just plant early (at the beginning of July) to ensure I get in a good
crop.
The downside of early
planting, though, is that good weather may mean your carrots head past
mature and into overmature before cold weather halts the plants'
growth. You can't really count on the days to harvest listed on
the seed packet to get this maturity data since 
shorter days slow carrots
down, but if you pull
out small carrots throughout their time in the ground to eat and thin
the bed, you'll
clearly see when the roots stop bulking up and start heading over the
hill by splitting or rotting.
And that's why I
harvested a third of our carrots Monday. We got 23 pounds from
two beds (and I've probably already harvested another 10 or 20 pounds
from those beds over the last couple of months), which filled up my
crisper drawer. Yikes! Now I have to figure out where to
store the other three beds of carrots.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Where WILL you store all that. Beautiful harvest? I have read that a cheap "root cellar" can be made by burying a metal (. Plastic will collapse) trash can up to the lid,then piling mulch in a mound a foot deep around . When needed, just pull back the mulch and open lid. I was thinking of trying this, since we don't have a root cellar either, and the thought of hand digging one is so daunting. Fortunately, the guy who owned this house before us was an avid hunter, and actually built an insulated "meat locker" to hang and age meat- it has a compressor to run a cooling unit to maintain temperature, but I've discovered that in fall and winter , when I really need it, it stays above freezing and below 50 degrees without any help ( on really hot days it has gotten a bit above 50) it only froze in there when we had 20 below zero temps, and then only around the edges. It is pretty critter proof, so I'm putting produce and my home canned stuff in there and hoping for the best. Worst case I can use some light bulbs to slightly raise temps if we get super cold. It won't have the nice humidity of a root cellar, but I think it wll do. I'm hoping so!
Daddy --- I was thinking of adding that, further south, folks might not have the freeze-thaw problem we do, but wasn't sure enough of my data to say that. Thanks for chiming in with your experiences!
Lindsey --- A lot of seeds just sprout on their own, so not knowing they might need regular watering isn't as crazy as it sounds. Carrots are on the harder end there, though, often needing coolish weather as well as rain to sprout.
Deb --- I'm jealous of your cold storage! That sounds nearly as good as a root cellar to me. We're probably going to see if we can dig out the fridge root cellar and get it going, and barring that I'm thinking of a simple in-ground clamp, maybe just lined with hardware cloth and topped with bales of straw. Too much produce to fit in current storage is a pretty good problem to have.
Sara --- Thanks!