How to grow and prepare carrots

Carrots are easy to grow in the cool days of spring.

I (Anne) was surprised to learn that wild carrots were originally purple, not orange. For fun, grow purple, yellow, or white carrots. You might want to try the All-America Selections award-winning Purple Haze carrot. The award means it was grown as a trial in many parts of the US and Cananda and is considered easy to grow in most areas of the country.

Planting advice

Loose soil is key for growing carrots, so they can extend their roots deep into the ground. If you don’t have the perfect carrot soil, don’t be discouraged. Use a large pot filled with good soil, deep enough to allow the carrot roots to grow straight and long. Sprinkle the carrot seed on top and filter loose soil over the seed.

Either in the ground or in a container, be sure to keep the soil moist with even watering. Using mulch over the bed will help keep down weeds and hold moisture in the soil.

If you are working with clay or rocks in your soil, you can plant the short, round carrots. Paris Market is a round heirloom. The heirloom Danvers also does well in clay. Scarlet Nantes is an old standby from gardens and markets past.

Since carrot seeds are slow to come up, plant radish seeds, which fairly jump out of the ground, in the same row with the carrot seed. These will mark your row so you know where the carrots are and help to thin the carrots as you pull the radishes. The carrots should be thinned to two to four inches apart in rows 1-1/2 to 2 feet apart. Plant the seed one-fourth to one-half inch deep.

Depending on the variety and the vagaries of early spring weather, you can expect to harvest carrots in 50 to 100 days. Be sure to keep the soil loosened and free of weeds by hoeing along the row.

When you have harvested those sweet roots, do try Chef Linda’s recipe. The recipe is perfect for a lazy day -- new, different, and easy.

Oven-Roasted Carrots With Honey-Orange Dressing

About all I (Linda) can say is, darn, they are really good, if I do say so myself. After I finished photographing them, I ate them all. ALL!

When Anne and I first talked about doing carrots for this blog post, I thought about carrots in pot roast, carrot salad, and the usual, but I decided that something new and fresh was in order. So I came up with the idea of roasting the carrots and then adding a dressing.

I used part of a dressing recipe that I usually make for a fruit salad. It worked perfectly for the fresh carrots. The sweetness of the honey enhances the sweetness of the carrots.

If you decide not to use the dressing on the carrots, just chop a few of the leaves and add them over the roasted carrots.

Hope you will enjoy the recipe. It’s so easy but has a lot of flavor.

Oven-Roasted Carrots

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