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.

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.

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.