Carrots and radishes

I was thinking about planting some carrots and radishes from seeds in a planter box.  It might be too hot for them, but there is shade in the front yard and that might be a better choice.  But then there are bunnies in the neighborhood and they might be tempted by the succulent baby produce.  Maybe that's alright, they need to eat, too.

This has made me think about my Dad and the garden he always had when we were kids.  Every spring he would plant a fenced off area in the backyard, maybe four rows about twenty feet long.  Carrots, radishes, green bush beans, beets, turnips, sometimes lettuce, and always tomatoes that he tied up against the fence.  Oddly, I don't remember the planting process, I think Dad just went at it for a weekend or two and got the crop in the ground.  He would go out every night after dinner and hand water it, sometimes an after-dinner beer in hand.

Radishes grow quickly, they are the instant gratification of the produce world.  A couple of weeks would go by and it was obvious that the seeds he planted were sprouting and poking through the dirt. But by then the radishes were two or three inches tall.  The carrots, with their distinctively feathery tops, were not as tall but we could identify them and therefore they were worth watching.  A month after planting Dad would carefully pull a couple of the tallest radishes, wash them off with the garden hose, and hold them out to any of us kids who happened to be in the yard at that moment.

There are few things better than eating something right out of the ground or right off the source plant.  We all know how amazing tomatoes are just off the vine, or apples and peaches from the tree.  But those radishes were, to me, a perfect taste of the beginning of summer.  They were snappy crisp, still warm from the dirt, spicy and almost sweet at the same time.  Some varieties (Dad always planted a couple of different kinds) had a good kick to them, some were a lot milder.  It's one of my best memories of Dad, garden hose in hand, rinsing the dirt off and handing it off to one of us (or one to each of us.)  He planted enough so that this ritual would go on for several weeks. 

We also had plenty of radishes to bring into the house, to slice into the salads.  Now people, me including, saute radishes sometimes and serve them as a side-dish. Dad would have laughed at that.

When it was time for the carrots, the same procedure took place.  A tiny, slim carrot would be washed off, we would eat it and marvel at how sweet and tender it was, so different from the cooked carrots we grudgingly ate.  When you grow your own carrots, or get them very fresh from a good source, there is a particular carrot smell that you never get from grocery store carrots.  Carrots with those feathery tops, fresh from the garden, smell like summer.

So while it might be folly, it might be too hot or the bunnies might feast on them, I think tomorrow I will get a little planting pot and some seeds and attempt to be a short-term urban farmer with carrots and radishes. 

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