The kiddos love fresh carrots – except Peanut. She loves to chew fresh carrots. When she’s done chewing, well, I’ll let you figure that out. But even with the rest of the family constantly snacking on a bottomless bowl of carrot sticks in the fridge, we still have a lot of carrots in the garden. According to some gardeners, I could cover them up with leaves and snow while hoping for a mild winter and then I could continue to pull carrots as needed until next spring. Maybe I could, but maybe there will be four feet of snow over the garden just like last year and I’d look like a crazy squirrel digging for nuts in the middle of winter. So, instead of running the risk of looking like a squirrel in January, it’s becoming a bit of a weekend habit to take a grocery bag up to the garden, comeback with it busting at the seams with carrots, and then make a mess in the kitchen.

With so many extra carrots, we’ve been freezing sliced carrots for use later. It’s not hard, it just takes time. The carrots are cleaned, peeled, sliced, blanched for three minutes, cooled, bagged and then frozen. One grocery bag full at a time seems to be the perfect batch size to fill the sink and doesn’t take long for one person to process.

Those of you that plant carrots know you’re supposed to thin the young plants as they grow. We have a hard enough time pulling all the weeds that pop up, it seems counter-intuitive to start going after the stuff we actually want to grow as well. But, there is good reason for it. Big straight carrots need room to grow. If carrots aren’t thinned you get a lot of this…

Despite the occasional “twisted” carrot, we ended up with way more “perfect” carrots.

But in the end, twisted or not, they’ll all taste the same this winter. As far as the mess left in the kitchen…

The chickens eat like queens the next day when we haul everything out to them.