It's Almost Like Christmas!

As much as I complained about the lack of rain, high temperatures, and how pitiful the garden was last summer, it turns out that there were some very good things happening underground. I decided that it was time to dig up the turnips and carrots before they froze in the ground, and had a lot of fun yanking up vegetables, never knowing what I was going to get. I knew there were going to some big surprises when I had to get the shovel to dig out some of them. It was almost like Christmas!

We only planted half a row of turnips, but got a decent number of decent turnips from those few plants. There were enough to fill a half-bushel basket. The carrots were the real stars. I ended up with a heavy bushel basket of some really delightful carrots.

It took me most of the afternoon to trim the vegetables, scrub them three times, and then find refrigerator space for all of them, but it was well worth it.

Here are the winners in the weirdest carrot category. They'll have to be cut apart when I use them to really clean them completely, but I wanted to document the multiple carrot families and odd carrot claw.

While we grew plenty of normal-sized carrots, several of them were huge. These are the winners of the biggest carrot prizes, with the largest nine inches long and ten inches in diameter.

This one is my favorite. It didn't meet its soul mate and get married like Margene's coupled carrots, but is more like some sort of Siamese twin carrot. I have no idea how one carrot grew perfectly twisted like this, but it pleases me so much that I may never want to eat it.

Since we will need to eat lots and lots of turnips and carrots, I started with carrot souffle for dinner. It's really just an excuse to eat something that tastes like pie but you can feel virtuous about because it's a vegetable.

We have so many turnips and carrots that I offered some to my neighbor. She said thanks, but no thanks. She didn't realize they were so ... dirty. All I could do was smile and wait until I was back in the kitchen before I started to laugh. As we approach Thanksgiving, I hope all of your carrots and turnips are both plentiful and clean!