What the Heck? Carrots in March?

Yesterday afternoon, Sly and I went out into the backyard to survey the winter damages on our little garden patch. It's pretty bad...

Our Lady is probably shaking her head at this mess

Taking care of the garden over the summer while I was pregnant provided me with a nice diversion. But as I got bigger and bigger (it was my third trimester), it became more difficult to bend over to weed, harvest, etc. Not to mention that even being on my enormously-swollen feet was unpleasant enough. So the garden sort of went to pot towards the end of the summer (see previous post: The Miracle of (Plant) Life).

And then once Sly was actually born at the end of August? Well, all desire to tend to my garden was completely supplanted (no pun intended) by my desire to tend to my new baby.

While we were out there yesterday, I noticed a little orange head peeking at me out of the soil. I dug in to investigate, and sure enough, out came a huge whole beautiful carrot! In March! Then I realized that there were at least 15 more just like it. Laughing, I began to dig in with my bare hands, and had soon produced a nice little harvest of carrots.


My only guess is that they had ripened very late in the summer, in that time after the baby was born and I had stopped checking my garden. I didn't figure there would be any more carrots, since I had planted all the seeds at the same time, and already had a booming crop a few weeks earlier. I'm assuming these carrots just spent the winter out there, frozen in the ground. But the freezing seems to have preserved them well.

They clean up nice

We tasted them last night, and they seem fine. So I guess now I need to start drinking tons of my carrot juice again (see number seven)!


And I'll end this post with a cute picture of my little Muffin, enjoying his first real taste (literally! ack! Those plants in his hands went straight to his mouth right after I snapped this!) of the outdoors :-)