Amarillo and St. Valery Carrots
St. Valery Carrot (orange) and Amarillo Carrot (yellow)
We harvested our first four carrots a couple of nights ago. We weren’t sure if they were ready or not so I pulled up a couple and was pleasantly surprised, they were definitely big enough to eat and looked very pretty. We planted two varieties this year, Amarillo carrots which are a light yellow color and St. Valery carrots which look like a standard carrot but so far have been a little wider than the Amarillo carrots.
We planted carrots here around May 20, 3 rows to our 30 inch bed, after they sprouted I thinned them out - about 1 carrot every 2 inches, and we had great success with them germinating although I missed quite a few when I was thinning them out, which caused some of our carrots to be too small to use. They have flourished this summer, and we should have plenty of carrots to use as we have been getting some from our CSA as well.
We cut one of each up and ate them raw, and they were both sweet and juicy, Jeremy thought the Amarillo carrots were a little bit sweeter than the St. Valery carrots but I didn’t think I could tell a difference between the two. I put him to a blind taste test and he couldn’t tell either. Both varieties taste so much better than the carrots you get from the supermarket and carrots have now become Jacob’s favorite vegetable along with roasted beets. I think we are going to cut some up and freeze them to use in stir fries, etc. during the winter.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 10:28 am and is filed under Colorado Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
haha! I love that you made him do a blind folded taste test. I would have done the exact same thing.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Well she said she couldn't tell the difference and I was pretty sure i could tell. I was right on the first 2 but then I failed, I couldn't tell them apart. At least there's a visual difference…
August 5th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Our CSA claims that our white carrots are sweeter than the orange variety, so maybe Jeremy is on to something
August 6th, 2009 at 2:47 am
That is really funny. Well maybe you should put your CSA folks to a blind taste test and see if she can tell the difference
To be fair Jeremy did guess the first two orange carrots correct but when it got to the yellow carrot he guessed orange again.
January 20th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
I saw your blog linked from the St. Valery Carrot page on Foodista. You've got me thinking about ordering seeds for this coming spring. I'm especially looking for heirloom varieties.