Winter carrots

 Last week, or maybe even the week before (goodness how time marches along!) I headed out to the garden to dig some carrots.  Lucky for me a handsome man with a shovel came along just in time to help.  He had a cute little dog with him too!

We leave our carrots and parsnips in the ground over winter.  I cover them with about 2 feet of loose straw to keep the ground from freezing, and this year, Mother Nature helped with an additional cover of snow.

The result is carrots and parsnips that are as sweet as candy all winter long.  Such a treat.

This year, with the snow cover, it's especially important to mark the rows of carrots so that you know where to dig.

My shovel and Home Depot orange bucket!

And just in time, help arrived.  You can see how deep the straw and snow are covering the carrots.

They are so pretty, such a bright orange, fresh and crisp, right out of the ground.

My job was to grab the carrots as Reynald dug them.  He grabbed these so that I could snap a photo.

After we had a full bucket, we moved the marker and then re-covered the exposed row with straw.

It's not quite as pretty as it was before we dug, but the results are worth making a bit of a mess.