Author: carrotdayma

I am an avid gardener, husband, father of three grown children and grandfather to four. Those children try to get home as often as they can to eat the food from the garden, especially in tomato season and I look forward to gardening with the grandchildren. I am also a former elementary school principal and teacher, who began gardening with students in 1996 and has been ceremoniously eating carrots with students for over twenty years. I believe that the goal of the gardener/farmer is to build the soil. It is my hope that Carrot Day Massachusetts will build the soil of our community by giving folks the experience of a really good carrot. When a person has eaten a really good carrot, they might be on a path of growing more food and loving to eat vegetables.

End of Summer and Start of Fall

It has been two months since I last wrote and the big star in the Hull Garden during these two months has been the mint. I would spend time each day looking at the bees. There were hundreds of bees and at least five different bee species on the mint flowers for well over a month. I loved it but last weekend I cut the mint down as they had dried out. In the last few days of summer here in Hull it is getting drier and drier. We have had no rain in 25 days and only 1 inch in the last 45 days. The mint had done its work and the pollinators had moved on.

I hope that you thinned your carrots vigorously and that they are doing well in your garden. Here in Hull I planted an early crop for summer eating with the goal of pulling a few carrots when the grandchildren visited in summer (see photo above from the middle of July) and then a late crop from Carrot Day Harvests after the first frost. The visits were great and the second crop was doing exceptionally well until some animal came over the fence and ate a lot of tops. Not sure what it was but it was not a bunny as the fence was way too high. I watered to help them recover and hope that the eater does not come back.

The photo on the right is from a Carrot Day Reader who also planted an early and a late crop and sent me the photo on the right.

For most of the past four years around this time of year we have had messages from Laney Signer. Laney is a scientist/educator who teaches about the benefits of regenerative farming and she, like me, tries to get folks to grow their own food. In general Laney teaches us a bit more about how to think about gardening and eating. Today she discusses the negative practices that can occur in large scale agriculture and in this case some carrot farms. Without any more introduction here is Laney’s post.

September 2024
What makes a climate friendly carrot?
I was shocked to open an email one morning over the winter with the subject line:
BOYCOTT CARROTS. I run a farm-based educational program designed to teach
adults about regenerative agriculture and soil health (Climate Farm School), and as a
regular contributor to the Carrot Day blog, I am a lover of these multi-colored root crops.
Especially when pulled out of the ground on the day of the first frost, which is maybe no
more than a month or so away.
The email was from farmer-educator mentors of mine, who run a dry-farmed wine
and olive production ranch in one of the driest locations in California: the Cuyama
Valley. Steve and Robbie of Condor’s Hope ranch are legendary agroecologists,
farmers and activists, and incredibly knowledgeable about sustainable water
management practices when it comes to growing food in drought-prone climates. They
joined forces with community organizers and smaller scale landholders (they farm on
about 5 acres, surrounded by 1000+ acre operations of wine grapes and carrots) in
opposition to a ‘water grab’ by corporate food giants Bolthouse and Grimmway Farms.
The Carrot Boycott became their way of resisting the totally unsustainable water
withrdrawals from groundwater pumping on the large scale farms supplying Bolthouse
and Grimmway with millions of dollars of carrots annually (comprising 80% of the total
US carrot market). The inhumane working conditions for farmworkers in their fields is
also increasingly under scrutiny, after a woman died in the fields last year and others
were told to work around her dead body. Tragically, extractive environmental practices
are likely to coincide with exploitative labor practices on large scale US farming
operations.
I read up on the issue on the “Stand with Cuyama” website: the Carrot Boycott
protests the excessive water usage (over 28,000 acre-feet per year, or enough to supply
3 cities the size of Santa Barbara with their water needs for a year) of the two largest
carrot growers in the area. It seeks to keep water rights in the hands of the community
rather than corporations, with the implicit understanding that the more locally rooted
farmers and land stewards are not pumping groundwater at such unsustainable rates.
Should this pumping continue, groundwater basins like the Cuyama Valley in California,
increasingly threatened by climate change impacts like worsening drought conditions
and heat waves, will suffer further degradation and potential collapse. It begs the
question, how much longer could we even continue growing carrots here with
groundwater basins facing collapse, and annual rainfall totals dwindling? This is not
climate resilience, it’s the opposite.

So, what makes a climate friendly carrot? Something like what we’re growing in
our home, community, and school gardens. On regenerative and diversified farms,
where carrots co-exist with weeds and worms and other biodiverse life in and above the
soil. I planted my Carrot Day seeds from Ted in my parent’s garden in Rhode Island on
Memorial Day weekend, and they are now popping out of the ground with great vigor.
We’ve harvested most to make salads and soups already, but a few remain to be
harvested for Carrot Day 2024. As we harvest our carrots this fall, from Massachusetts
to California, let’s be happy to be in the 20%… or should I say, probably less than 1% of
the US carrot market that is truly climate-friendly and home garden grown.

Laney Signer

It is hard to know what to do. Carrots are good, and in general the more plants we eat the more friendly to the earth our eating is. Maybe a thing to do is to not just eat those you grow yourself but perhaps get carrots grown in Canada. I see carrots in my local store are often from Canada and those tend to taste better too. Perhaps I will find out the disadvantage of the Canadian carrot but it might be a good thing to do. And yes do as much as you can to grow your own and to get to know your farmers.

Ted

Juneteenth — July 4th and Carrots

On Juneteenth, as I have for the past few years, I planted the “Carrot Day” carrot crop. Back in March I had planted an earlier sowing of carrots with hopes of again this summer picking carrots with grandchildren when they visited Hull. The photo on the left below shows the Juneteenth “Carrot Day” carrots and the photo on the right shows the March sown carrots. Maybe by the end of Izzy’s stay in mid July we might be able to pick a tiny carrot, but I have high hopes that at the end of July, before Reggie goes home to Texas, he will be able to pick a small but decent sized carrot. Later in this blog post I write about the planting error I made with the Juneteenth sowing and while the purslane is more obvious than the carrots, in the end the carrots germinated well.

There are many things that I am good at in the garden. Some of them include: crop location with good strategies for moving them from place to place year on year, adding seaweed to the soil every winter, digging as little as possible, weeding, succession planting and vertical gardening to make the most of a small space, and my greatest skill — harvesting. What I am okay at is thinning, I should thin more than I do but at least I know that and try my best. What I am not good at is sowing seeds. I have been gardening for 50+ years and still I have not developed the right set of skills for planting seeds. When I garden with children they often do a better job of putting seeds in the ground than I do. The Juneteenth planting of carrots was no different.

On Juneteenth I was barefoot in the garden as I prepared the carrot bed. For carrot plantings I do dig the soil with a shovel to prepare for the seeds but this year I did so in bare feet. I did not wear shoes this year because I hoped that bare feet would help me not to overdig. The less you dig in a garden, the more the ecosystem that lives in the soil can develop. I almost never use a shovel, instead I usually use a small hand held garden trowel or my hands and leave most of the garden undug. By using minimal digging and by adding adequate organic material to the top of the soil the soil ecosystem will deepen and the soil will be enriched year after year. A great example of the impact of healthy soil is our peppermint. Between the street and the garden is mostly mint. These pictures of the mint tell the story of how differently the peppermint grows in the enriched soil near the garden and the unaugmented soil closer to the street.

As you can see from the photographs the mint near the road is pretty small. A typical stem is less than two feet. The mint near the garden is more than twice as big. The mint on the left in the photograph, which grew near the street, is far smaller and a paler shade of green compared to the mint on the right, which grew right next to the garden. The one from near the road measures 22″ while the one from right next to the garden is 52″. While we grow more mint than I can make into tea to drink or give away, the health of the soil makes a huge difference. I probably don’t need such healthy mint but these mint plants tell me just how much soil matters.

The photographs above are of the mint hanging to dry and bowls of the mint leaves stripped of their stems before I put the mint away for the winter in quart baggies. I made 18 quarts of mint tea and i am drinking a cup as I finish editing this blog. It is really really good.

As I mentioned earlier in this piece I am not good at sowing seeds. Let me tell you more about the error I made in planting the “Carrot Day” carrots.

On Juneteenth I had fun digging in the soil and building a level bed to create a shallow well to conserve water if I needed to water the late planted carrots. Then I made little troughs and put in the seeds. I then watered the bed without covering the seeds. Well my level bed was not as level as I thought and I imagined all the seeds floating down hill. So I made some more troughs and put replanted the bed with some more seeds. From looking at the germination pattern on the higher side of the carrot bed I think that the second planting of carrots done on Juneteenth are the ones that germinated. Even after 50 years I am still making mistakes. As Van’s song, which I shared in the previous post tells us, “Sometimes it goes like that.”

Below are some photographs of other late spring/early summer crops. One of the photos of the last of the lettuce — I did make another planting of lettuce but only one lettuce plant came up. I did not prepare the soil well enough as I relied just on my hands and did not even use a garden trowel. “Sometimes it goes like that” and the lettuce does not germinate. The arugula keeps going, this year as it has for the past twenty. And beets – well Katy loves beets and so do I. And not photographed is the chard, but it is a banner year for chard. Katy asked me for more chard and less kale and collards. Soon it will be high summer with cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and zucchini will be pouring in — or so I hope.

Happy gardening. The next time I write to you I expect I will be urging you to thin your carrots.

A Song, Order Your Seeds, and Memories

I received an email a couple of days ago with a song written by a former student, Van Harting. I had taught Van when he was in first and second grade back in 2004-2006. I love the song and its called Carrot Day Massachusetts. Listen to it in the link below https://vanwilliamharting.bandcamp.com/track/carrot-day-massachusetts.

What an honor to have a song based on the ideas and stories shared here on this blog. There is something that comes from the compression that comes in a song that gets to the heart of things.

“It’s why I sow hope in spring
Comes each year, don’t cost a thing
Sometimes promises they manifest
Sometimes they come to nothing”

That is right, sometimes things work out in the garden and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes things work out in your day and sometimes they don’t. Hope does come in spring, even cold springs like this one and hope comes every time you plant a crop. I hope to make the goal of sending out seeds to 100 folks and 33 folks have used this form already. Sometimes you make your goal and sometimes you don’t. Here is hoping you listen to the song and order your free seeds. They don’t cost a thing.

Back in the fall of 2004, when Van was in first grade, I had already grown carrots with The Garden Project at South Shore for five or six years but it was not yet a formal celebration. We didn’t wait for the frost and we didn’t eat the carrots ceremoniously. We just picked them, washed them, and ate them.

On November 3rd 2004 the class went to visit Holly Hill Farm as we did every Wednesday afternoon and probably before the first frost the students picked and ate carrots. As was our way the next day the students in first and second grade wrote about their experiences while the Kindergarteners drew about theirs. It just so happened that I still have the writing that the students did that day as Heidi Harting and I turned our trips to Holly HIll Farm into a book with the students’ writing, their drawings and Hiedi’s amazing photographs. November 3rd was a windy day and below are photographs of the pages in the book with the writing that they made the next day at school on November 4th. I am so proud that we always started each visit with a circle where we would focus on a sense. That day it seems like it was listening as you can see by our postures and the students’ beautiful writing. Type is small but I hope you read it.

Page 8 A Year at Holly Hill Farm, All the Animals Are in Their Shelters

Page 9 A Year at Holly Hill Farm All the Animals Are In Their Shelters

I am very grateful to have been able to grow food with students and proud of who they have become and proud of who they were. Hope you order your seeds. Thanks Van for the song. I love it. Thanks Heidi for the book and thanks Jean and Frank White and Jonny Belber for those fabulous days.

The Arugula the bunnies don’t eat but my swimming friends do

Hard to Wait: Feelings and Facts

It has been a little over five weeks since I last wrote and in that time not much has changed in the garden. Much less than I had hoped. As I sat down Saturday morning March 30th in a sunny room in a warm house I expected to be writing to you to encourage you to order your free carrot seeds and to tell you the facts about how March was colder than February. I went to the internet and wrote down 116 numbers — the high and low temperatures for the 29 days of February in Hull and the first 29 days of March. I had all kinds of ideas on how I could compare the two month to show that February was warmer than March.

Facts being facts though I need to tell you my impressions were wrong. In Hull, in absolute terms, the month of February was colder than March. In February there were twenty days when the low temperature was below 30°F as compared to four in March. In February there were only four days where the high temperature was over 50°F while there were eleven in March. But feelings come from somewhere and in Hull the official high temperature did not reach 60°F during the first 29 days of March but it did in February and in March there were seven straight days where the lows were lower and the highs lower than the historical average for that day. While I could not find official records for wind speed in Hull, there is a weather station at Logan Airport. Logan Airport like Hull is also on the water, somewhat more protected than Hull as it sits on Boston Harbor not the Atlantic Ocean but still exposed to wind. At Logan airport the number of days in February with wind speeds over 20 mph were 7, for March it was 17. It was not the temperature that was getting to me, it was the wind.

I accept that March was warmer than February but I have been hoping for more warmth and growing, and a lot less wind.

I got an email this month from Jessica Tay who has a website about growing and Jessica found us somehow and has linked her site to Carrot Day Massachusetts and I would encourage you to explore her site www.littlegreenyard.com. One of her articles is about carrots and carrot seeds, it is fun and I recommend it. As always, it’s good to know we are not alone and that there are many people out there hoping to encourage us all to grow our own food.

Don’t forget to order you Free Carrot Seeds with this form.

I wrote the first draft of this post on the morning of Saturday March 30th, by the afternoon that day the wind had lessened and in Hull we had the kind of day I had been waiting for all month. May the days also turn your way and please order your free carrot seeds.

Spring, Cold Frames, Seed Order and of Course —– Hope!

It was about ten weeks ago that I last wrote to you all. In that time Katy and I ate all of the cold frame lettuce, turnips and radishes, and the hearty collards and kale. We ate regularly from the garden until the second week of January when we had our last salad and fresh greens. Katy and I have been eating home grown food since then but it has all been frozen or canned. That is about to change again with the coming of SPRING!

The darkest quarter of the year is over and spring is right around the corner and the early harvest season of eating tiny plants is about to come. Under the cold frames there are some turnips, radishes, kale and collards that have overwintered and they are beginning to grow again in our returning light. There are also the new crops of arugula and lettuce that germinated and grew under the cold frames.

It takes time to turn those tiny plants into a salad. I have written before that I have the patience for the hours of labor to pick the greens to make a single tiny salad. I can sit there doing that task because I know if I put in the work now, later it will take only ten minutes to pick the greens for ten salads. I do need to thin the fresh crop of arugula soon or the individual plants will over-compete and produce less.

In the pictures above there are thousands of arugula plants and one kale plant and one spinach plant. Back in November when I planted this bed I probably planted about 100 spinach seeds and I am unsure how the kale got there. I wish more spinach survived the winter but grateful for the one that did and as you can see too many arugula plants survived. There is some serious thinning of arugula to do as this variety grows best when there is a single plant on six inch centers. My guess is that there are at least a hundred to be pulled for every plant that I allow to grow to maturity.

About four years ago I was standing on our porch overlooking the Hull garden alongside my son in law Josh Modell. Josh asked me what I was most proud of in the garden and I looked out and said the arugula plot. I told him that it was the most unusual part of the garden and I explained the process by which I grow the arugula plot. That plot of greens that year like this year comes from a November spreading of the arugula stalks full of seed pods and then covering it with a cold frame, no digging at all.

This week as I lifted the cold frame for the first time since putting it down in November to see what was under there I was reminded of a story my Uncle Henry told me. My Uncle Henry taught me how to make pottery and how to live a life. I went to spend the summer with him and Mary in 1976 when I was fifteen. In a Carrot Day post soon after his death I wrote about him. That post, among other things, was about shallow wells to water beds of vegetables. My brother John on reading the post proclaimed, “The post was about how I learned of shallow wells from a ‘deep well.’ ” The “deep well” is my mentor Henry Pope.

Back to the story Henry told me, a big part of the joy of ceramics is the mystery of what happens in the kiln. Henry told me a story of a potter. The potter was an old man and a renowned potter, so renowned that the government of Japan had made him a “National Treasure.” Despite his age, experience and skill he would peek into the kiln as it was cooling. He could not wait to see what had happened in there. I felt that same way when I uncovered the arugula plot from its cold frame. I know it can be unwise to look under the plastic too soon just as it can be unwise to peek in a kiln when it has not cooled down enough. I was like the old potter who could not wait and I took the risk and as I took that risk I thought of Henry. The green carpet under that cold frame was magic just as is remembering Henry was magic.

Turnips on the left and radishes on the right. They are both members of the brassica family and they sure do look a lot alike.

So spring is coming — I force it early with the cold frames. The carrot seeds have been ordered and I hope I can send them to you. I hope that I can send seeds to 10 schools and 100 individuals.

They are free. Click this link to order your seeds. I can’t wait to hear from you.

Carrot Day

Well the Northern Hemisphere is now tipped away from the sun and fall is nearly over and the frost has come to Massachusetts– even to Hull.

Early in November I got a message from Windsor, Vermont that they had frost. Then came news that there had been frost in West Cornwall, Connecticut, and then Norwell, Massachusetts. Reports were coming in that Carrot Days were being celebrated and that the carrots were good.

Here in Hull surrounded by water, frost did not come until November 17th, but Carrot Day is not only about good tasting carrots, it is about patience. It is tricky to choose the right day to celebrate Carrot Day. Do you want to celebrate Carrot Day as the marker of the first frost or do you want your carrots to sweeten with repeated frosts? I see that choice as part of Carrot Day’s value. You can’t choose when your birthday is but you can choose when to celebrate. Many a Friendsgiving is not held on the fourth Thursday of November. Is the weather lousy today, is there a hockey game, does the sixth grade schedule have a science class today? If the first day after the first frost is not the right day, well then let’s let the carrots get a bit more cold and celebrate the carrots on another day. The best tasting carrots have nights with repeated frost but the ground will not yet be frozen and the carrots’ cell wall structures will not have frozen.

Below is a chart of the first five frost in places where carrots were celebrated by Carrot Day readers.

Location	First Frost	Second Frost	Third Frost	Fourth Frost	Fifth Frost
Windsor, VT	10/31 29℉	11/01 31℉	11/02 26℉	11/03 31℉	11/05 31℉
Cornwall, CT	11/01 29℉	11/01 24℉	11/11 31℉	11/12 26℉	11/13 21℉
Norwell, MA	11/02 30℉	11/03 28℉	11/08 32℉	11/11 28℉	11/12 25℉
Plymouth, MA	11/02 28℉	11/03 28℉	11/11 30℉	11/14 31℉	11/18 30℉
Chatham, MA	11/03 31℉	11/12 31℉	11/13 32℉	11/19 31℉	11/21 31℉
Cambridge, MA	11/11 27℉	11/12 23℉	11/14 29℉	11/21 27℉	11/24 23℉
Hull, MA	11/19 31℉	11/20 28℉	11/27 28℉	11/30 27℉	12/01 30℉

Dates of the first five frost in Carrot Day locations. Temps were reconrded temperatures by weather services not carrot growers

Carrots from two gardens in Hull and carrots from a garden in Chatham.

Photographs from carrot harvesting for Carrot Days in Cambridge, Hull, and Plymouth. The photo on the left is from Carrot Day at the Community Charter School of Cambridge, where I now work. The middle photo is my garden in Hull. The photo on the right is from the amazing school garden at Manomet Elementary tended by Anne-Marie Ross.

There is something magical about picking a carrot. There is a prize hidden under the soil. I have been pulling carrots with students for over twenty years and each year and in each group there is excitement. There are always cries of joy and surprise and almost as much excitement about an extremely small carrot as a great big one.

Carrot Day can also be multi-generational as it was this year in Chatham, MA and West Cornwall, CT. These photographs show grandfathers and grandsons and the joy of pulling carrots together. As a grandfather, who pulled a carrot almost every day for two weeks this summer with a grandson, I can personally attest to the magic. The tender gaze of the mother as she watches the celebration of discovery and sharing is worth remembering as the days grow shorter and the nights longer and colder.

I am proud to say that the tradition of Carrot Day persists at South Shore Charter. We began celebrating the pulling of carrots about twenty years ago in the Garden Project. There was magic in planting carrots seeds with students in the spring and then harvesting carrots with them in the fall. I loved tending and caring for the carrots when the students were away in the summer and then we had the long wait with students for frost in the fall. It was at South Shore that the idea began, and June Fontaine continued that tradition there again this year. Here is some of what June wrote for the school’s newsletter to families:

This past spring, carrots were planted by first grade co-teachers Nikiesha Whitman and June Fontaine’s first grade students in the Garden Project. The first crop didn’t fare too well, due to all the rain, so a second crop was planted in early summer, along with tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and peppers. Students delighted in harvesting these crops when they came back to school in late August. They knew the rule of the carrots though; they were not to be harvested until after the first frost, as the cold converts the starches to sugar, making them sweet and delicious. Last week we got that first frost and so on Friday, the second grade students in Nikiesha’s pod who had planted the carrots, helped the first grade “neighbors” to pull these orange jewels. Watching the students work together was truly gratifying. After scrubbing them on Monday, the students enjoyed the carrots during snack time today. A good 95% of the class ate them! And several had more at lunch time.
Here’s hoping that the delicious sweetness of these “frost-kissed” carrots will give them a taste and desire to enjoy this nutritious vegetable in the future. Next year, we plan to plant many more carrot seeds so that a larger community can enjoy Carrot Day together. The garden offers a peaceful place to sit and relax, eat your lunch, or merely take a few moments to breathe in the heady aroma of mint or wild arugula.

Pictures of June and the students harvesting carrots at South Shore Charter. I agree with June that the garden does offer a peaceful place and a place of wonder and I also agree that 95% of the students eating carrots is good enough.

The Carrot Crew in Hull in early December and the first frost on carrots in Windsor VT a month earlier. I know that not everyone succeeded with carrots this year but lets hope you grow good ones next year.

Soon I will be ordering seeds and I hope you join us in planting, weeding, thinning, tending, protecting and waiting for the frost and cold for a truly delicious carrot. Only a few days until the solstice and then the days will begin to lengthen.

Fall, Cold Frames, and Planning for Frost

Well it has been two long months since I have written to you and when looking at the photographs from the August 2nd post, not all of my hopes came through but enough did. Sometimes it is like that.

On August 2nd the tomatoes were not yet in full swing and while they never came in the abundance of most years we did get some and since mid September Katy and I have had all we could eat and cook. These past two months the stars of the garden have been greens, zucchini, and cucumbers. This is peak season for greens. The zucchini has hung on and is still making the occasional fruit. They are not producing like they were, but they are still growing and one of the plants has traveled twelve feet from its origin. Last year for the first time we grew a variety called Costata Romanesca Zucchini and this variety has transformed how I think about Zucchini. I can’t imagine ever doing without it. For cucumbers we planted both National Pickling and Suhyo Long Cucumbers. There were days in August when I would wander around the neighborhood giving away cucumbers and after I put up 16 quarts of pickles Katy told me that was enough. I planted a late crop of cucumbers dreaming of a second crop in September and October but something attacked the plants and they never amounted to anything. Sometimes it is like that.

That is what happens in the garden. Sometimes the promise happens and all the hopes of the sowing are manifest and sometimes there is nothing.

In the last post I wrote about both collards and tomatoes. The collards have rebounded from insect attacks and have done well. But the tomatoes — in early August I had dreams of piles and piles of tomatoes but they never really came into their own. It was a combination of wet, windy weather that prompted tomato blight and also attacking animals. I had particular hope for two volunteer tomatoes. I wrote of them with great anticipation in the August 2nd post but they only half filled their promise. The red cherry produced lots of good tomatoes but the brandywine type did almost nothing. What fruit it did produce was pecked at by wildlife just as it was ripening. In time I started to pick the big tomatoes from all of the plants as they were turning ripe to be ahead of the animals. That move has helped get fruit but not the glorious perfect tomatoes of other years. Sometimes it is like that.

The two pairs of pictures below tell those two stories. The story of the collards — good news and the story of the tomatoes — bad news. The collards were able to overcome their attacking pest and the tomatoes succumbed to tomato blight. Tomato blight is exacerbated by cold, wet, windy weather and we had that in abundance here in Hull. Anyway we had enough tomatoes for Katy and me and the black cherries were delicious.

There are times of glory for different vegetables at different seasons and the time is now collards time and the time of cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes is past. It should also be the time for butternut squash but somehow I did not time the planting of the butternut squash just right and they will amount to nothing. Sometimes it is like that.

With Indigenous Peoples Day and a week of forecast with lows in the 50’s and highs in the 60’s it is time for the cold frames and for parsley. Parsley is one of the world’s finest cool weather vegetable crops.

This blog is about gardening but it centers on carrots and the main carrot crop planted on Juneteenth is thriving. I also planted an early crop in a cold frame and think I will continue to have an early crop as the joy of pulling carrots when we have grandchildren visiting in summer is not something I want to give up.

I pulled that first crop of carrots but not before five or six of the plants got confused and thought they were two years old and produced flowers. As you can see in the left hand photo below those confused carrots were tall and leggy. The photo on the right is of the Juneteenth crop and I think come the last week of November or the first week of December we will have a wonderful carrot celebration. Sometimes it is like that.

I am looking forward to hearing from you all after your frost kissed carrot harvest. It is together that we celebrate Carrot Day. I am excited to learn what your “sometimes it is like that” turned out to be this year. Hope it is glorious but it will not always be that way.

Tending, Harvesting, Sharing and Preserving

Well July has come and gone. For us here at 41 Western Ave in Hull it started with a big week as our two older children and their children and spouses were here for most of the July 4th week. We ate greens and arugula by the bushelful. It was busy and crazy and we all missed Josie.

Ben, Maud and Reggie stayed almost to the end of the month and there was much less from the garden to give away or preserve as the eaters matched the garden production and in fact we did some supplementing from the Hingham Farmers Market. Last Saturday the Baltimore contingent arrived with tomatoes from their Baltimore garden. I found it very exciting for a child to bring us tomatoes. Josie had once written a beautiful essay about tomato season in Hull and how summer here in Hull was tied to tomatoes and the garden and was a reason to be in Hull, but this year here on August 1st no tomatoes were ripe. It was totatoes that we had been lacking and what a joy it has been to have Cleo bring some really good tomatoes to go along with the harvests we did have.

The title of this blog is Carrot Day and I am pleased to report that the Juneteenth carrots are prospering. The radishes have all been pulled. Several times in the past six weeks the carrot bed has been weeded and thinned. The bunnies have been kept out behind the wood and chicken wire barrier. I think the bunny population is thinning as the phlox and the blackeyed-susans are making a comeback and the parsley that is above the fence is not being eaten, but it is reassuring that the bunnies have not eaten the carrots. While I still see rabbits every day I think there are fewer rabbits at 41 Western Ave or perhaps they are just eating other things. Anyway I think the carrots are safe.

The three photos above tell much of the story of the past five weeks. We have been blessed with visits from two of our children and their families. Izzy, the child in the middle, and I pulled a carrot yesterday from the spring-coldframe-planted carrot bed and he washed it with the hose and then ate it. He shared with me a taste and while it was an okay carrot with good crunch it was not frost kissed. I suspect if it was frost kissed he might not have been so willing to share it. It was fun to watch and hear him eat a carrot. I think it is the thrill of the harvesting and the self sufficiency of washing it himself that makes him want to eat a carrot. The photo on the right is Reggie celebrating the beauty of collard leaves. That photo was taken about three weeks ago and since then some insect has been eating the collards, as you can see if you look very closely at the photo on the bottom right of the bank of photos below.

Living with children two or nearly two years old for the past five weeks has been transportive. It brings back memories of the amazing time in our lives when we lived with small children every day. It has also reinforced for me why gardening with children is powerful. The idea of Carrot Day is that homegrown/school-grown food tastes really good and is an entry way to healthier eating for us as individuals and healthier ways of living for us as a species.

Living with two-year-olds has also had me thinking about turn-taking, sharing and child development. This time of thinking has been stimulated by watching our children raise children. I have also had the advantage of being with an early-childhood professional. Maud, my daughter in-law, has taught preschool for twelve years and is an assistant professor of practice in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin. As it says on the UT website, “Her practice is informed by an interdisciplinary approach that views learning as a collaboration based in mutual trust, and children as social agents. We grow the community we want to see in the world …..” Community is a goal of gardening with children at home and students in school and Community is a goal of this blog.

One metaphor I hear often from educators who are not thinkers about gardening is that the classroom is like a garden. Every year as I tend the garden I am so glad that is not actually true. Gardening is ruthless and it is certainly my hope that classrooms are not. Every time I am in the garden I am making decisions about what will thrive and what needs to be eliminated. My long term goal is the soil and I try my best to always keep that in mind but I thin and weed carefully cultivating what has a chance to thrive and what does not. I hope there are not many classrooms where the teacher is making those kinds of choices.

That said, I have been thinking a great deal about turn-taking. On one side of the garden the tomatoes have been growing well while on the other they are one-fourth the size with one-fourth the fruit. I think perhaps I was too permissive with the arugula around those tomato plants when they were small. They are doing a bit better now that I have pulled out more of the arugula and given the tomatoes more space. While I am gardening I have made up a little saying I say to myself, “When in doubt pull it out.” I am afraid that even with that saying I don’t quite thin aggressively enough and as can be seen by the tomatoes I can ask for too much sharing. In the garden there is competition for light and space and nutrients and while seaweed and low till practice and vertical supports add to the nutrition and sunlight in the 41 Western garden there is still competition and winners and losers. But turn taking really does work. The radishes have had their turn, now it is the carrots turn. In amongst the bean bed two volunteer tomatoes grew. One was a cherry type and one a brandywine type. The beans are almost done and I suspect these will be the most productive tomato plants come mid September.

The photograph on the left is of those two tomato plants in the bean bed. The photograph in the top right is of the cucumbers climbing up the structure and over the sorrel and into an area newly trimmed back mint. The sorrel had its time to be central in early spring. The mint had it moment in June when I havested a years supply of mint tea and the cucumbers are having there moment now. In fact in the last couple of days I put up eight quarts of pickels at the same time we eat cucumbers at every meal. It is the photograph on the bottom left that tells the most important story of turn-taking and sharing. While I did cut back some mint most of it I saved not directly for human harvest but for pollinators. If we collectively can think of resources as finite and part of interconnected ecosystems perhaps we can build that community Maud talks about and “We grow the community we want to see in the world.”

Postscript: This morning Izzy and I took the boat in and out of Boston to visit the Aquarium. When we got back he aksed his dad, Josh Modell, for a “garden carrot.” Izzy and I went over to the spring-coldframe-planted carrot bed. I lowered the bunny fence and put him in the bed and he pulled a carrot. He asked to go and wash it. He then held and ate the carrot for about ten minutes. His dad says he does not eat vegtables. The good news does not end there. As I inspected the collards this morning the new collard leaves were untouched by insects. Perhaps the balance has changed again and we will get those glorious collard leaves again.

Hope you have a good summer and can garden or enjoy children’s inspirations, and the support of friends.

Juneteenth, Mint, Chamomile, Greens and Planting Carrots

On Father’s Day I swam and gardened. The photo above is some of what I picked from the garden that day. From the food on the counter I made turnips and turnip greens, froze some kale and turnip greens and worked hard to give away arugula and lettuce. Tomorrow I will go to work and hope to give away more arugula and lettuce.

On Father’s Day I also began the process of making tea. A tiny bit of chamomile and a whole lot of mint.

I also thinned some carrots and they were tiny and good.

For the last several years I have planted carrot seeds on Juneteenth. Juneteenth is a good day to get your fall harvested carrots seeds in the ground. These days because of the challenges of bunnies in the “non-cat chapter” of Katy and my life together planting anything is not a simple matter. First I had to build a barrier to more easily fence the bunnies out. As you can tell by the piles of food the barriers work. Below is a picture of bunnies and a new garden bed. The bunny in the front is standing right in what is now the carrot bed. Bunnies don’t eat arugula so it could be wild and free. The same can not be said about carrots; they will grow inside this box, which will be covered with chicken wire to keep the bunnies out.

Hope you did something memorable and celebrated Juneteenth today.

June and in Massachusetts, Time to Plant Carrots

Well it is June and in Hull we have the porch furniture out, put up the sun shades and are eating festive dinners on the porch. The sounds of birds are in the air. The greens are going full tilt and it is getting to be time to plant carrots for a Frost Kissed Carrot Harvest and Carrot Day Celebrations in November or December.

If you have not ordered your carrots this is your last chance. Here is the link.

Arugula and on the left a head of butter lettuce

There is too much in these green harvests for Katy and me but we have willing neighbors and friends who are happy to relieve us of the surplus. Plus we have news that some children and grandchildren will be here later in June. The first Arugula Swim of the year is coming up on June 4th. In an Arugula Swim my swimming friends come to Hull and the prize is arugula. It is also graduation season and the only thing I am bringing to potlucks is salad.

The photos below are from a succession bed planted in late winter with various greens. Readers of these posts know that my strategy for this kind of bed is that fast growing crops like radishes, my new favorite, are harvested first. Then the slightly longer maturing ones, like lettuce, are harvested. This leaves room for the kale, collards and chard harvests all summer and fall.

My publicly stated goal in the garden is healthy soil. I say I want to build the soil by always adding more to the surface of the garden with annual gifts of seaweed and compost and then to trust the natural processes to bring those nutrients into the soil. The process of the nutrition going from the surface into the soil supports the formation of networks of living organisms, which in turn help the soil retain moisture and nutrition. Each year I want the garden to produce more. I try to do as little digging as I can so that networks develop and the complexity of and richness of the soil develops over the years. I now understand what a privilege it is to be growing in the same soil for decades. I am blessed with good fortune.

But is soil actually the goal? I say the goal is the soil and the harvested vegetables are the byproduct of that goal. But I don’t think that is actually true of this Carrot Day Massachusetts Project. If I am to be honest the goal is actually community. Carrot Day will not save the earth by sequestering carbon in soil, by getting children excited about eating a really good carrot and then to change a bit how we live. As readers know from the annual posts here at Carrot Day, written by Dr. Laney Siegner, regenerative agriculture and its potential for carbon capture is an important tool in slowing climate change but this little patch will not do much. What this garden is really about is community, our neighbors, friends, children and grandchildren. For me the most important member of that community is Katy Lacy.

When thinking about my life with Katy I now divide it into two chapters. The first chapter was with cats and now we are living in a chapter without cats. In the cat chapter, many things happened, we lived together, got married, had children, grew gardens, lived in houses, and built careers and then the children got partners and and they all built lives.

Much is the same in the “non-cat chapter.” That chapter began on June 23rd, 2021 when our last cat disappeared; she was probably taken by a coyote. The next day our first grandchild Izzy was born. In the “non-cat chapter” there are gardens, houses, marriage, children, childrens’ partners, careers, and childrens’ lives. These things have all persisted but there is one big addition — grandchildren and with grandchild came the pleasures of seeing echoes of our younger-selves. We, especially Katy, send more time away from Hull.

As we are away from Hull so much it no longer felt wise to have cats and the loss of cats has forced me to change my gardening habits. When we had cats the bunnies stayed away and I did not think about bunnies. But now every gardening move I make I take bunnies into account. There are fences or boxes around the vegetables bunnies eat, such as carrots, lettuce, and beans. And there is freedom in other sections for the vegetables bunnies don’t touch like arugula, tomatoes, zucchini and cucumbers. The protective boxes I made from the old fir decking that we had on our porch. We replaced the decking so the grandchildren would not get splinters. Katy and I were fine with the children getting splinters but we are not fine with the grandchildren getting splinters, they can learn splinter induced lessons at home.

The reason I am going on this tangent is because Katy really likes these fences and boxes. I put them there to thwart the bunnies but it also makes it easier for people other than me to go into the garden. Katy said to me this week that the garden was now like “the garden at French Laundry.” I don’t think we are at that level of neatness but it did make me happy.

I have not been very welcoming to others, including Katy, in the garden. Once our daughter-in-law Maud said to Katy, “I just wish I could go in there” to which Katy replied, “I’m not allowed in either.” Before the bunny protections it was very difficult for anyone but me to know where to be or how to move but now with the bunny protections it is much simpler for others to be in the garden and I hope I become more welcoming.

The goal of maximizing production, interplanting, using the edges to have crops such as butternut squash grow among the mint did make it hard to know how to be in the garden. I was more interested in production and soil than rows and order. I was forgiving to small children, with their light small feet, but not so generous with adults. In this post I am celebrating our new life without cats and with garden boxes and small fences and a more welcoming attitude to others in the garden. With time I can see that maximizing community is really more important than maximizing crops.

Happy gardening and happy new chapters in your lives and your gardening lives.

A new thing I did today was to harvest chamomille which we will drink as tea. It was great fun and smells so good.

Fighting bunnies has helped me grow. I am still mad about how they eat the black-eyed-susans, the flox and the crocuses. I won’t fence everything in, even if it would make it look neater. I don’t care that much for neatness. I haven’t changed that much. The bunnies do leave the daffodils, lily of the valley, iris and many other plants alone.

Here is to flexibility and acceptance and minor adversities to produce growth. However I am not going to celebrate growth so much as to encourage splinters from our porch in a grandchild. Growth can be overrated.