How Does Your - A slow sprout
Garden Grow?
Our Danvers half long carrots were due to be pulled between July 11-21, but I let them go a little longer than recommended. It was intentional this time, I swear.
They should have been ready anywhere from 70-80 days after directly seeding outdoors, but there were supposed to be a few signs that they were due. I should have been able to see their vibrant orange “shoulders” poking out of the ground, and their tops should start yellowing. It was also suggested that if the carrot tops were one-half to one inch in diameter, they were probably ready. But guess what? Not one of these signs ever appeared even days after their scheduled harvest date. This feels very on-brand for me.
I went with my gut and let them cook a little longer. This was for a couple of reasons; first, they weren’t showing any obvious signs that they wanted to be yanked out of the dirt. Second, I already knew that I had weather issues with the plants I could see above ground so it’s entirely possible that my carrots struggled too. Carrots like to be more dry than my other veggies or they’ll get soggy and I watered them less often than everyone else. I tried to time my watering with the rain, but come on, it’s Wisconsin, and with all the wet weather we got they might be growing a bit slower. And that’s okay, some of us do!
Now there are risks with letting them go longer than their 70-80 days. Carrots left too long get woody, or tough, kind of like those radishes that I ignored and we all know how that went. So a couple of days past their target date I loosened the dirt around two carrots and gently pushed it aside to catch a peek at those delicious roots.
And I was right, they were definitely not ready. One showed a lot of promise; it was starting to look like a carrot, just a little underdeveloped. The second one was a little disappointing, but I know exactly what I did wrong. I had two carrot tops pop up right next to each other at exactly the same time, and I didn’t notice it was two plants and not one until very recently. Did I cull one when I noticed them growing too close together? No, because I hate pulling plants that I spent forever trying to grow. There was not enough space to sustain two plants so close together and if I didn’t sacrifice one I’d lose them both.
This was really difficult and it felt exactly like it did when I was thinning the beds out front; I’ve killed what I love the most. While it was painful, it was necessary, and I pulled the smaller plant to give the stronger one a chance to thrive. In checking each pail I noticed that I had several plants growing tightly together when I just thought their tops were really fluffy, so begrudgingly I pulled those too. Those carrots better appreciate what I’ve done for them.
I won’t check under the dirt anymore because I don’t want to gamble with their lives when my odds of accidentally killing them are already high all on my own, so I’ll wait for the more obvious signs before harvesting. I loosened the dirt surrounding the carrots in each pail to give them a little bit of breathing room and applied a thin layer of straw on top of the soil to keep it slightly moist but not drenched. Hopefully this will help them reach their full potential sooner rather than later.
In related news our iceberg lettuce was due for harvest last Thursday. Thankfully there’s less guesswork in plants we can actually see above the ground, and we already knew those were stunted, so I’ll just keep monitoring them. The same goes for our muncher cucumbers which should have made an appearance at the same time as our lettuce. Our whole garden is full of late bloomers.
Amazingly, almost as soon as I moved my beans to the partial shade of the garage they began dropping their burned leaves and putting all their energy into new growth. At least it looks like we’ll have a few plants that might be ready to harvest when they’re actually due. -Insert wisdom about shedding your worries and focusing on being healthy here. It looks like before too long I’ll be able to pull the radish seeds from the plants that I accidentally bolted. They each have a couple of little pods dangling from the stem and I have to wait for them to dry up and become brittle before I can pluck them. Once they’re dry and I take them off the stems I’ll have to give them a couple of weeks to cure in a cool, dark place before I can plant them. Hopefully this will be right on time to get a crop in before the fall freeze. If not, I’ll be ready for spring!
I did get a jalapeño pepper off one of my plants from home. Those containers are very happy and the only thing that didn’t pan out so far was my single watermelon, but she was already pretty sketchy when I bought her on clearance. Somehow the containers that I’m not getting paid to weed are getting a bit overrun. Weird.
Our chickens and guinea hens are fat, sassy, and spunky. We did have three of our leghorns turn out to be roosters, but they’re well-behaved so far. As long as they can keep up their good behavior, they can stay. One hen in particular has an attitude problem. Henrietta has been attacking our feet and more than once she’s chartered a flight out on the sneaker express as we scoop her up and nudge her back.
I guess we’re officially chicken tenders.
Mandee Ellis is a reporter at The Star News. Contact her at Mandee@centralwinews.com.
