Picking & Canning Carrots

   What a carrot harvest! This is probably our best year yet. We've enriched and softened the soil in the garden every year ever since moving here six or seven years ago and not it is paying off. Of course, they don't look like the carrots you find at Costco, but they are sweet and large and not split so we are excited.

Harvesting is the best part of gardening and everyone likes to take part

    I don't know how many we got, but we got quite a few. Enough for a day or two of fresh eating, to make a batch of bean and bacon soup and to can up a few quarts for future chicken noddle soup or other dishes that call for sliced carrots.

We try to get most of the dirt off before taking them inside.

We have three hoses hooked up to our house and they all get well used.

    Then they're pulled inside to do the fine cleaning and to have their bad spots cut out. This is where most of the fresh eating happens too. as we all bustle about doing our own jobs and things we grab a carrot here and another carrot there and crunch on them as we work. I don't think there's a single member of our family who doesn't like carrots -- cooked or raw.

Then we use our Bosch Cutter/Slicer to chuck up all of the carrots that the munchers left.

    Canning carrots by themselves is really simple. We just heat the slices up in a pot of water and then ladle it out into jars once it is hot along with a bit of salt. They have to be pressure canned, but not for very long. Mom usually leaves the pre-canner stuff to me and I live the canner to her -- since I do not feel too comfortable around those sputtering bombs.

    And you're finished! Just label rise and stack the jars of the shelf for later use. Really, canning carrots is one of the easiest things to can -- besides green beans or potatoes.  I like quick, easy canning sprees that don't take a full day or two days like soup does.