How I Store ROOT VEGETABLES (that last through the winter!) | Market Garden | Grow GREAT carrots!

They say that good things are worth waiting for. And I have to admit that this year's carrot harvest was indeed worth waiting for. Because I have grown so many horrible beds of carrots that have been all tangled up and weird and knobby and practically inedible. It certainly wasn't one we could fill up in the But you guys, we did it. It's not because I all of a sudden became an incredible gardener, but rather because I took some well-needed advice from a few gardener friends of mine, and lo and behold, experience speaks to the gardener. And because of that, we were able to pull almost 260 pounds of carrots out of our market garden this past week. And we still have time for another harvest before the first frost. So I am giddy. I am a kid in a candy shop, quite literally, because carrots are my candy. And these are big and beautiful. And despite the weeds and all of the tomatoes that went to seed in the carrot bed, it was an exciting day to pull all those out. It was well worth the wait and well worth the work. So let me tell you, let me tell you the advice that I was given that completely changed the way that we grow carrots. Well, first off, if you've been following us for a while, you know that we only farm two and a quarter acres here in the Pacific Northwest. So we don't have a huge plot of land. And it wasn't until the last year that we put in this market garden. Now, even though we call it a market garden, it's produce that we only grow for ourselves. We call it this because we grow in long market style rows. And unlike the potager, that's a little bit of me. Do you see yourself? Unlike the potager, where the flowers and herbs are all tangled together, the market rows are designed just for one specific crop in one row, ideally making it really easy to plant and maintain and harvest. So putting in the market style rows was the very first step that we took to wanting to actually grow significant amounts of what I would call our storage crops. So things like potatoes and cabbages and carrots and beets and turnips, those sorts of things. So it's really important to me that I learned how to grow these crops well, because as novel and fun as it is to grow a few pounds of carrots, that's not exactly going to feed you through the winter. So after we put in the market style rows, I consulted my gardener friend, Grace, who lives just down the road. She is an incredible gardener and sells at our local farmer's market. And she turned me on to a few things that completely revolutionized the way that we grew carrots. The first of those was a big fork called a broad fork, just like it sounds. It's about 30 inches wide, and you throw it into the ground, stand on it, and use your weight to wiggle the fork back and forth. And it has these big 18 inch long spikes that go down into the ground, and you lift the soil. So you're not tilling it, but what you're doing is you're loosing it up and you're adding air down to a really, really deep level. This essentially gives the carrots room to send the root down and to grow big and long and straight. And that was huge because if you've ever grown carrots and you've grown them in poor soil or maybe soil that's a little tight, you know how they pull out if they pull out are these little short stubby things that, you know, they're not exactly pleasing to the eye. So my carrot bed gets broad forked at least two or three times before I plant my seed. And then after we harvest the carrots, it gets broad forked again. This adds so much amazing activity to the soil through worms and bugs. You're adding life down into that deep, deep layer. And the result is a much healthier and bigger crop. The second thing that Grace taught me how to do to grow better carrots was to use a pelleted seed. I get a specific storage carrot seed from Johnny's Select Seeds. I've grown this for a few years now and I love it. And if you're unfamiliar with what a pelleted seed is, it's a carrot seed, which is teeny, teeny tiny. And if you've ever tried to plant the non pelleted ones, it's super hard because they're really lightweight and they're really small. So to get the spacing right is super tricky. Well, with pelleted seed, you're able to dig your furrows and you can see the seed. It's a white little ball that you can easily grab and space perfectly. The result is carrots that can grow bigger. If you don't thin your carrots, you need to. So pelleted seed helps to get the spacing right. And then make sure you take the time to thin the carrots, giving each of them a few inches of space on either side of them so that they can grow big. Imagine that. Now, once the carrots are pulled, they get packed into potting soil. This is sterile soil, so there's nothing alive in it and stored down in our root cellar. Now, last year, Stu built me a walk-in cooler down in our root cellar, the cellar that's below our kitchen. This is where we keep our carrots all through the winter. So we took those 260 pounds of carrots, we packed them into plastic bins in that potting soil, got them damp, and stuck them into our walk-in cooler. Now, we did this last year with our carrot harvest, even though our harvest wasn't quite as big, and we had carrots well into the spring. So I know this system works and it works really well. So now when we need a carrot or two, it's a quick little jaunt from the kitchen down into the storage. I can dig my fingers down into that cold soil until I find one, pull it out, and then recover the remaining carrots with the rest of the dirt. And we'll just continue on like this for the rest of the winter. It's quite amazing to see this space fill up from all the milk and carrots and onions, soon to be the beets and the cabbages and the parsnips and the turnips, the garlic and the purple onions. There is still a lot to be put into these spaces before winter comes. For what it's worth, I never peel my carrots. When they're fresh from the garden, they're really sweet and tender, and I don't bother.