Carrot Success!

FINALLY!

I have successfully grown carrots!

You should have seen me pulling them up.

I was so excited, I was laughing just a bit.  :)

I turned the small finger carrots (which were actually thinnings) into ice box pickles.  I was excited to find volunteer dill amongst the sweat peas too.  Some of the larger carrots were used to make whole wheat carrot and whole wheat carrot zucchini bread (using last year's frozen zucchini harvest).  Logan loves pickles and you should have seen his eyes when I told him I'd made him carrot pickles from our garden.  He was so excited!  I don't love pickles (because I don't like how the cucumbers get mushy) but these ice box carrot pickles are crunchy, fresh, and salty.  I'm a fan!

My friend and I were talking about the concept of urban homesteading and preserving.  We decided that with urban homesteading, its not as much about preserving as it is about eating through the seasons.  Oh I'd LOVE to have enough land so that I could make enough tomato sauce, canned diced tomatoes, pickles, frozen zucchini pucks for bread, frozen basil pucks for pesto, etc....to last all year.  But the reality of URBAN homesteading, is that there's just not enough room.  So the focus is more on eating out of your garden and using what is there NOW.  So, by Summer's end, we may be a bit tired of tomatoes (which is hard to imagine now when we can't wait for the tiny green tomatoes to ripen), but then we will go all Winter and Spring without tomatoes and will long for them the following Summer again.  The only bummer about this is that I WANT to turn some of the veggies into pickles and some of the tomatoes into sauce.  So my friend encouraged me to do ice box pickles.  I'd never heard of them before.  I thought pickling took time.  Nope, just overnight.  So easy its ridiculous.  And I know there will be times in September where I'll have tomatoes coming out of my ears and then I can turn the excess into sauce.  I just don't think we'll bother canning it.  We'll just put some in mason jars and stick them in the fridge for use over the following two weeks.

We're slowly figuring out this urban homesteading thing.

Just trying to make it work and stretch as much as possible.

Now to know what to grow in the winter so we can keep our garden producing year round.

Suggestions?