Sweet winter carrots: cultivation and harvesting
Want to continue growing great food during the icy months? Try growing winter carrots in your icy house!
These carrots that Eliot Coleman grows on his farm in winter, they are even sweeter and more flavorful than more conventional “spring carrots”.
Below is an excerptWinter Harvest Manual By Eliot Coleman. It has been adapted for operate on the Internet.
A guide to sweet winter carrots
‘Sweet Winter Carrot’ is our most prized winter crop. Parents from nearby towns tell us all the time how much their children like these crunchy treats.
We leave these carrots in place in the ground under icy housesdigging them as needed. The most effective soil-wintering variety we have found so far is ‘Napoli’, a diminutive but full-flavor carrot.
When to plant winter carrots
For the October harvest, we plant in the last week of July, and for the later harvest, in the first week of August. We plant in fertilized soil by sprinkling the soil improver with green oat and pea fertilizer a month before sowing carrots. At the end of October, we take care of enormous areas of carrots with mobile greenhouses.
Our Sweet Winter Carrots are always dug fresh from the soil in which they grow; we dig them outside in October and November, and from the beds covered with greenhouses in December, January and February.
Storage in the ground
Storing them in the ground, in icy soil, additionally improves their taste, sweetness and crunchiness when eaten raw. so that the last ones harvested at the end of February will be even sweeter than the first ones.
Because the tops remain green beneath the inner layer, we always sell our carrots with an inch and a half of green top layer. This creates handsome packaging and allows us to recognize our carrots as “freshly picked”. rather than from stock, which allows us to charge a higher price.
These carrots enjoy almost legendary popularity in our markets. We cannot grow enough of them to meet demand. The deliciousness that comes from being grown in the fall and stored in frosty soil takes the humble carrot to another level.
When to harvest and eat winter carrots
During deliveries to our stores, we saw little children running to the produce stand, asking their parents to buy lots of “candy carrots.” This crop is at its best for only five months in the October to February season. Once modern peaks begin to appear in March, they begin to lose their sweetness.
We have experimented with extending the harvest period for our sweet carrots, but have not yet succeeded. We tried adding a layer of insulation to some of the beds in mid-January to prevent spring regrowth, but this prevented the significant daily influx of solar heat, causing carrots and soil to freeze for weeks.
After thawing, the carrots were of indigent quality. We also planted carrot varieties that resume root growth in the spring, starting with a slow September/early October sowing date, in the hope that we might find one that could be harvested in April. So far the taste has been disappointing.
In winter we sow a modern crop of carrots, which we sell in spring. Our Novel Year’s carrot sowings, made at the end of December after autumn lettuce, are ready for sale on May 10. For them we operate the “Mokum and Napoli” varieties. These are wonderfully sweet spring carrots, but no matter how tender and flavorful our spring carrots may be, they cannot compare to the appreciation of our sweet winter carrots.