OVERWINTERED baby carrots... What to do with them?

[applestar]

I was cleaning up a bed I had experimented with some fall crop. Carrots I sowed were teeny when the frost and freeze came, and I gave them up as lost cause. But today, I was cleaning up the bed (found two small slugs clinging to the fall leaf mulch ) and realized quite a few of the carrots had survived the winter and are now almost baby carrot size and starting to grow some greens. I harvested the biggest of these and they were quite good.

However, some of them were wrinkly and when pulled out of the soil, the loose skin pulled right off or were easily rubbed off, and interior was spongy.

Now there are a bunch of them that are pinky size or smaller -- not big enough to eat yet. Most of them had pushed themselves out of the ground or had been frost heaved, so I just pushed them back into the wet loose soil.

-- this is new to me. Usually carrots that overwinter are big, thick and woody, often wormy (rotten hollows occupied by earthworms, black wire worm tunnels, bottom half missing from mice or vole and growing fibrous roots.

What can I expect form these tiny carrots? I would assume at some point they will try to bolt. I'm fine with letting some of them flower and go to seed, but I s there a timing for harvesting them for the kitchen before they are no longer good to eat? Should I side dress them or mulch them?

[Gary350]

I did the same thing with carrots about 15 years ago. I planted carrots in the fall and they froze in the soil and could not be pulled up. Spring the skin pulled off several carrots I assumed they froze and the skin died. I had a lot of small carrots too small to pull up so I left them to grow larger. I screwed up a month later hot weather made the carrots became hard as wood. So I decided the crop is lost so what is there to loose just leave them until winter and see what happens. My carrots grew larger and after Halloween the weather turned cold and about December the carrot were soft and good to eat. I pulled all the carrots before the ground froze and we ate them all. We ate the tops in salad. Carrots don't do well in TN soil it is too hard, this was one of my raised bed experiments with soft soil. I can only grow Denver half long carrots here.

[jal_ut]

You can plant them. They will likely go to flower and make seed. Seed is good for planting next season.
Or just toss them in the garbage. Not a big loss.
I grow carrots from seed planted early as soon as the ground can be worked in the Spring. Then some later plantings too.
Royal Chantenay, and Danvers Half Long do well here.



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