Carrots Can Be STUNNING

I am not the greatest grower of carrots, but I do eat a lot of them. I've had luck with other root crops from sweet potatoes to turnips, daikon, and radishes, but carrot culture eluded me for a while. I particularly love the purple carrots pictured above. I don't know if they taste any better or more nutritious, but they certainly appeal to the botanical artist in me. 

These are called Cosmic Purple Carrots. The interior can be solid orange, yellow, or orange with a yellow core. Like most unusually colored vegetables, they don't really maintain their color after they've been cooked, but just a little. Carrots need loose and light soil that is deeply worked, but no nitrogen. Some gardeners suggest working soilless seed starting mix or perlite into the carrot bed as well as making sure the soil is not at all compacted. Too much nitrogen makes the carrots hairy and woody and they won't taste as good. Once the tiny carrot seeds are planted just below the surface, the soil must stay damp in order for the carrot seeds to sprout. A rookie mistake, which I somehow seem to make regularly, is to plant them too thickly and fail to thin them. If you don't thin your carrots, you'll have lots of teeny tiny carrots that are not worth harvesting.

It's a good idea to plant carrots in the summer and harvest them in the fall. Carrot seeds like to germinate in warm soil and are sweeter when harvested after some cooler weather. However, if you plant them in the spring and you end up with carrots with a bitter taste, you can rescue them by cooking them with salt. Though the carrot will not get incredibly sweeter, the bitter flavor will be leached out. If my spring planted carrots get this way, I will often use them in a slightly sweet Asian stir fry.

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Purple Cosmic Carrot...What I Will Grow Again Next Year

                                                First harvest of purple cosmic carrots

Root crops, except for turnips and garlic, are not my specialty. After seeding in loose and fluffy soil, most require vigilance, to make sure the soil does not dry out and crust over.  This is true for beets (which one day I WILL successfully grow), but especially true for carrots, with their tiny seeds.  Now, with retirement (though I am busier than ever!) I have the flexibility to water every morning, and in the afternoon or evening if it is very dry. Some gardeners cover the newly planted seed bed with newspaper, and keep it damp.  Try it, but it never worked well for me, and I forget to remove it soon enough. You can also try carrot seed tape (strips of paper with seeds embedded at proper spacing, but I have only ever seen a few varieties commercially-prepared this way. DIY here: https://www.finegardening.com/article/make-your-own-seed-tape).  Make sure you thin your carrots after they sprout. Despite all this trouble, this spring, I had great success with Purple Cosmic Carrot. It seems to sprout more easily and quickly, and grow lushly, and tastes good.

But, bad gardener Judy, I let a second crop of carrots grow and mature through a hot, dry spell.  This usually turns carrots bitter, but this variety did pretty well.  It was tasty, with occasional bitterness.  How to cook the bitterness out of carrots?  Slice and shallow steam in water or stock, with a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar.  After the liquid steams off, I add an Asian-inspired sauce (made with hoisin sauce, tamarind concentrate, or gouchujang) (I am an improvisational cook and make it up as I go).

And, as a botanical artist, I find the color to be AMAZING (carrots studies below).