No, really. I already harvested carrots. Well, Amie harvested them:
No doubt you’ve noticed that these are baby carrots. Baby carrots. I had let that bed go to weeds, and when pulling said weeds today found that carrots have much less purchase on the soil than weeds do, and they too came up. So after weeding I called Amie over and she had a ball pulling the carrots (3 ounces of them, without greens), and then eating them. Crunch crunch. Delicious! The greens went into the vegetable soup.
I also harvested my garlic. I know this sounds too early too, but they were ready, many of them already browned and fallen over. Considering how well they were doing a month ago I had expected a larger harvest.
As you can see, the bulbs on the side of the tray- a softneck kind – are smaller and/or they mostly lacked the outer skin that protects the bulbs. Maybe I harvested these too late? They’re still good, and I’ll use them in cooking over the next few days. The bigger ones – all hardnecks, the scapes of which were delicious – are just fine, and I’m curing those in my warm, drafty, dark attic.
They make for 8 x 10 cloves – give or take a couple. That’s enough for planting next September.
Here is a short version of a very long story. Back in ’99 visiting South Korea for 3 weeks, I had one of the best meals of my life.
The staff at the small camp kitchen at the ramie textile festival in Hansan near Sochon had no English/German/French (the only languages I can speak).
So the cook came out and she looked me up and down, before going off to prepare a bespoke meal for me.
A strong onion, bacon and cabbage soup was served with the usual kimchi and rice.
But the best bit was a side dish of baby carrots cooked with their leaves still on.
I just checked in my sketchbook, and I didn’t write whether they were steamed or stir fried, but they were heavenly.
We rarely succeed in germinating, let alone in growing carrots in our stony soil, so I haven’t yet tried it for myself.
M, I love your story! What an interesting place to be. Did you make a sketch of your meal?
I do not doubt the dish was wonderful. Those baby carrots you buy in the store – really adolescent carrots lathed into some semblance of innocence – don’t do the *true* baby carrots justice.