Thursday, June 18, 2009

Your Freezer is Your Friend....

With garden harvests beginning to roll in, I started to weigh my options for preserving all this veggie goodness. I don't own a pressure canner (yet) and we are just beginning Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University, so I won't be dropping $100 on one anytime soon. I DO own a deep freeze and a Food Saver! (Although my Food Saver is an older model than the ones shown here...these are pretty!)

When my carrot harvesting was complete this morning, I ended up with this:

I was pretty ecstatic, to say the least! This was my first year to successfully grow carrots!

After cutting off the tops (and giving them to the chickens) and scrubbing the carrots, I blanched them according to the directions found here.

The final yield was seven bags of carrots for the freezer!

I added a little pat of butter to some of these so we can just steam them right in the Food Saver bag in the microwave. Others I left without butter to use in soups and stews.

We did spare this carrot:

Which the girls named "THE CARROT MONSTER...MWAH-HA-HA!" They wanted to save it to show to their dad and play with it a bit! THE CARROT MONSTER gave us an opportunity to talk about how carrots solve the problem of hitting a rock under the soil. Good stuff!

6 comments:

islandgardener said...

There is a blog called the Bifurcated Carrot, but I believe yours is Trifurcated!!!!! If you can think of some famous person it might resemble, I am sure you could sell it on E-Bay!

Dr. White said...

LOL! So true! Maybe I'll have to list it and see what happens! It looks like one of the "Ghosts or Goblins" from Scooby Doo to me!

Heather said...

Maybe you can do a post on just how you grew those beautiful carrots. Mine are absolutely awful no matter how I try to make them strait. Yours are awesome, I elect you to teach a carrot class please:-D

HermitJim said...

Now THAT is a spooky lookingt carrot! I sure wouldn't eat it! I'd be afraid of it coming back to haunt me...

Beautiful carrote(the rest of them!)

Wishful Acres Farm said...

Last fall a friend washed hers, put them in a giant ziplock with a paper towel, and tossed them into the back of her fridge. She was still eating them this April! Just had to cut off a few bad spots each time.
I think I may try that as well this year. Modern root cellaring, lol.

Dr. White said...

Heather, it all has to do with mounding my good garden soil up prior to planting. If I didn't, my carrots would have grown only a couple of inches down then hit hard clay. I also planted them according to The Farmer's Almanac...which I'll be following again next time for sure! They follow the moon phases for planting root veggies. I don't know if this really helped or not, but my carrot harvests in the past have been sad...really, really sad. Thanks for the virtual pat on the back! I was pretty proud of those lovely orange beauties!