Thinning

A few weeks ago, it was time for a little carrot thinning in the garden. This is our first time growing carrots, and the concept that you have to thin them out (and more than once!) was new to me. We thinned them at the beginning, but as they've grown, we've had to continue thinning to make room for the remaining ones to grow. Turns out, carrots need room to grow underground and if they're not thinned, they don't grow.

Before thinning: it's just a big bushy carrot top forest!

I forgot to take a picture afterwards, but it didn't actually look that different, despite removing nearly half the carrot tops. And since we were in the garden, we decided to do a little more harvesting.

Parsley, basil, assorted tomatoes, radishes,
padrons, assorted beans, and lemon cucumbers

Rainbow chard and red russian kale

Radishes and carrot tops

We tried to use the carrot tops for a pesto, but it turns out that they're a bit too fibrous...it was a straight-to-the-compost-pile concoction. Luckily, we'd made parsley and basil pesto first, and already had way more than we needed for our pesto pasta dinner. And some of the carrot tops had little teeny carrots attached - sometimes when you thin carrots, what comes out of the ground isn't really edible. But this stage of thinning produced some adorably tiny little guys!

Salad featuring the tiniest carrots known to man, as well as
radishes, lemon cucumbers, tomatoes and chard from our
garden. And yes, that's a glass of Westvleteren 12.

More garden updates to come!