Veggie Spotlight: The Humble Carrot

Farm Update

After being harvested and washed, these carrots dry in our
packing area before going into your shares.

Hi everyone! It's been another buy week at the farm!  This morning Fred and Logan cleaned 2000 pounds of onions using an old root washer Fred found in one of our outbuildings.  Although it's designed for washing potatoes, beets, and turnips, it also does a great job of taking off the excess peels of onions and brushing off the dirt.  We also pulled the last wave of onions and shallots out of the ground, and they are now drying on top of the soil in the field.  It's been really dry lately, so we've been irrigating a lot as well, but we know in a few weeks, drizzly October will arrive and we'll have to irrigate a lot less.  The tomato vines are starting to get old and worn out, and once that happens, the tomatoes begin to dwindle until they eventually die back for the year.  But even as one crop begins to wind down, others are just starting their lives.  Our fall radishes and spinach have germinated, and they've just poked out of the soil and emerged into the light of day.  It won't be too long until they're fully mature and ready to harvest and eat.  Each farm season is a series of beginnings and endings, and fortunately, we still have seven weeks of veggies left before the season winds down for good.

What to Expect in your Share this Week

If you are picking up at one of our regular drop-offs (Alma, Mt. Pleasant, and Midland) this week, here are the options you’ll find at each station!  If you have a half share, you’ll choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you’ll choose two.

Cherry tomatoes or slicing tomatoes
Carrots
Potatoes
Onion or garlic
Cooking greens mix
Surprise veggie (choices from a whole bunch of odds and ends coming from the field)
Lettuce, green beans, or Brussels sprouts

And if you’re having your share delivered or picking up in Lansing, Okemos, or the Midand hospital, here are your options.  If you have a half share, choose either share A or share B, and if you have a full share, you get to choose two.

Share A:                               Share B:

Cherry tomatoes                  Slicing tomatoes
Carrots                                 Carrots
Potatoes                               Potatoes
Onion                                  Garlic
Cooking greens mix            Cooking greens mix
Surprise veggie                   Surprise veggie
Lettuce                                Brussels sprouts

Veggie Spotlight:  The Humble Carrot

When harvesting carrots, we use the undercutter attachment for
our tractor to loosen up the ground underneath the carrots, which
makes harvesting them by hand a lot easier.

The carrot is extremely common in the American diet.  Orange carrots are found in every grocery store across the country, and virtually every small child knows what they look like (even if they’re a little shaky on identifying many other vegetables). But what do you really know about this ubiquitous food that you’ve probably been eating your whole life?  Welcome to the life and times of the humble carrot.

This popular vegetable originated somewhere in modern-day Iran or Afghanistan, but was extremely different from the orange carrot we now have at our tables. Thousands of years of traditional breeding have turned the original carrots from a tough, thin, bitter purple root into the typically orange sweet root we have today. The first carrots were mostly used for the aromatic foliage and for the seeds, much like we now use dill, which is a close relative of the carrot. Through medieval times it is referenced many times for medicinal purposes. When it first came to Europe is widely disputed, and there are a lot of historical unknowns due to its confusion in ancient writings with the closely related parsnip. However, its movement to the Americas is a little more certain, as it showed up very soon after Columbus came to the Americas is 1492. Back in the 1600s, more definite descriptions of carrots appear, and orange is mentioned along with many other colors of carrots that were present. The real push in the US and Great Britain came during the first and second world wars, when other foods were highly rationed but carrots could be grown at home and stored well. During World War II, Great Britain didn’t want the Germans to know how effective their radar was, so they famously spread the rumor that their fighter pilots could see so well at night because of their high carrot intake.

The carrot has great nutritional benefits, the most well-known of which is the high beta carotene levels found in the orange carrots.   This beta carotene, once ingested, either converts to vitamin A (which the body can use in a variety of ways), or becomes an antioxidant to help mitigate the harmful effects of free radicals in the body.  Our mix of carrots is yellow, purple, and orange, and you can see that each has a slightly different flavor than the others.  The sweetest is the orange, where there have been more breeding efforts. We expect in future years there will be greater improvements in the yellow and purple carrots that will increase the sweetness and ease of growing.

Our carrots start their lives out by being seeded directly into the ground during the first planting of the season. They are also one of the last seedings of the year due to the extremely frost-hardy nature of this plant. After being seeded, they come up and are cultivated with our basket cultivator, and then they are hand weeded two or three times before becoming mature. During most of the summer, they are irrigated heavily with our drip tape, mostly to germinate the seeds, but also through dry periods to prevent the bitterness that sometimes occurs when the plant is stressed by lack of water.  They are then harvested by hand and cleaned through a combination of soaking in our wash sinks and being sprayed by a high-pressure hose. Carrots can be harvest very late into the year; it is typical to harvest them through December, although care has to be taken to harvest when the ground is still thawed. They can also be covered and harvested anytime that the ground thaws throughout the winter. 

We really love cooking with carrots, and have many favorite preparations when it comes to this surprisingly sweet root.  We hope you enjoy them this season as much as we have been! J

Recipes

Okay, I can't be the only one who got a little bit geeked when I saw this gorgeous carrot cake from Martha Stewart!  This is just one of her many fantastic carrot recipes, just in case you're looking for something new to do with an old favorite.  And if you're new to the concept of cooking greens (which everyone will be getting in the shares this week), here is what we do with them:  Normally we cut up some bacon into little pieces and cook it down until it's not quite done, and we add some coarsely chopped cooking greens to the pan.  Cook them until the greens are slightly wilted, and then add a little salt and brown sugar to balance the flavor.  Apple cider vinegar or balsamic vinaigrette are also great.  Enjoy!