Category Archives: Garden

This post has been in the works for quite awhile now.  If you’ve already ordered carrot seed for your spring garden, don’t despair — these results are from our fall grown crop.  Given our growing conditions, fall-sown carrots often do best here anyway, as the early heat of summer often limits the sweetness and growth of spring-sown carrots.

Carrot taste comparison (and far less rigorous growth comparison due to differential germination and thinning) – Grown Fall 2012, tasted January 2013, overwintered in low tunnels prior to harvest.

Taste comparison for carrots grown fall 2012 in St. Louis, MO in double dug clay soil after potatoes and prior to that lawn, probably a little on the acidic side.

Tasted sliced to ~1/8” or 3/16”, both raw and steamed for ~7 minutes, until soft but not mush.

We rated each carrot on a scale of one to four, one being best, with rating for how well that carrot grew (the number in parentheses) and how it tasted, with notes on taste both raw and cooked.

Favorites

• Danvers ½ Long – great germination and growth (1) fairly sweet & carroty; steamed – very sweet and flavorful 1
• Cosmic Purple – (1) raw – mild sweet & spicy; steamed –sweet, spicy, flavorful 1
• Dragon – (purple) (2) (raw) – carroty, mild sweet good flavor; steamed – mid-sweet, spicy, flavorful 1

Next best

• St. Valery – great germination and growth and size (2) raw – good, not amazing, mild sweet, mild spicy; steamed – pretty good, not best 2
  
• Yellow Carrots (j.o.d.d.) – (2) – raw – firm, crunchy, sweet gentle carrot flavor; steamed – mild, sweet, carroty 2
• Chantenay Red Core –  (2) Smaller Carrots – Raw – Sweet full flavor, carroty; steamed –good flavor, but not amazing 3
  

Eh, don’t bother

• Muskade – (4) poor germination – tasty to slugs  – Raw-not sweet, watery, not favorite; steamed – worst flavor, watery, not sweet, slightly carroty 3
• Kuroda – very good germination and growth (3) Raw – carroty; steamed –decent flavor, but not amazing 4
  
• Scarlet Nantes – beans ’11  (4) poor germination Raw – Carroty; steamed –poor flavor
  
• Atomic Red – (4) – raw – a bit harsh, very carroty; steamed – carroty but not very sweet, still a bit harsh 4

Keeping the varieties separate while harvesting, cleaning, prepping, and cooking was truly a labor of love (i.e., huge pain in the butt), and something we don’t plan to repeat often.  Now that we have our results, we will focus our efforts on growing our favorites, allowing the purchase of a larger quantity of seed, which saves money.

Send in the vampires because the sad day has arrived, my friends.  We are out of garlic.

Back in July, around the time he harvested many big, beautiful bulbs of garlic, Matthew also came across a guy selling his own locally grown garlic for a decent price at the farmers’ market.  Knowing how much we love garlic — I start most dishes with the assumption of a nice-sized bulb — and knowing that he would be saving the best of our bulbs for planting this year’s crop, he bought thirty bulbs to supplement our harvest.

Over the last several months, we made the most of that garlic — garlic in almost every dish, roasted garlic here and there, and a nice batch of bagna couda later, our stockpile dwindled.

Unfortunately, the bought garlic was not nearly as high quality as what we grew — it did not store as well and had smaller cloves which are less fun (read: more work) in the kitchen.  Whether it was garlic variety, growing conditions, and/or harvesting conditions, it just didn’t measure up.  Still, I made the most of it, salvaging what I could toward the end and dealing with the small cloves.

So, here we are in early March, with our last bulb of garlic (yes, our kitchen counter tops are, in fact, purple).

A bulb in the hand . . .

This guy started to sprout, but with four or five nice, still-firm cloves, I had no complaints.

After stretching things out as long as possible with a jar of minced garlic we received as a gift, it was time.

I used our last bulb of garlic in veggie fajitas on Thursday night.  In my effort to not overcook the garlic, it ended up a bit on the raw side — not ideal, but what can you do?

We currently have over 400 bulbs of garlic in the ground, waiting for harvest in June.  Though we’ll be saving some for planting next year, we may have enough to get to this point next year without supplementing.  Until then, I guess it’s back to the store for garlic.