Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The carrot peeling are yours, Baldric...
This home-grown organic stuff tends to get a little like hard work when I am peeling my misshapen bi-colored carrots (the bottom half, before adding trace elements, is a sort jersey-cream yellow. Add trace elements and the carrots turned orange, and stopped being quite so skinny). Anyway it does feel like hard work when the carrot peeling and trimmings are a bigger pile than the carrots. And to be honest, they're not the sweetest carrots ever eaten. Still, they're carrots, and we had carrot salad, a green salad of own lettuce, own olives, and a couple of flounder we speared (thank you, freezer) and some coquetten (crushed potato, thyme, egg, and a little flour) - all mostly from the garden or our chickens or our hunting... We must have one of the lowest food bills in Australia, and most carrot peelings (the chooks get them tomorrow).
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I'm sure the chickens will love them, and have even orangier yolks. But I have given up peeling carrots. Just kind of "sand" them off with the stainless steel dish scrubber thingie (a wad of curly stainless steel threads).
ReplyDeleteIf you get bees, NEVER thriftily feed the dead bees left on the hive stand after a hive inspection to the chickens. I did that, and several hours later the bees evidently discovered the remnants of bee alarm-scent on the beaks and attacked the poor chickens with clouds of bees. Chickens were squawking and shaking their heads and trying to hide. Eventually I carried them up to the upstairs screened porch on the other side of the house. Bees didn't bother me. One chicken's eyes closed (though no swelling visible) for two days - I thought she'd starve. All fine now, but still on the upstairs porch. http://www.flickr.com/photos/29830015@N06/6166311498/
Not a good long-term situation. There had been no interaction in the three weeks before, so I hope it won't happen again.
I don't peel carrots, either. I more or less lightly scrape them. I tried using a scrubber to take the peels off, and it worked well -- but then I was stuck with how to get the peelings out of the scrubber :-(
ReplyDeleteWash them well, drag a sharp knife lightly down the carrot, away from you. The scraped bits of peel you can feed to the 'chooks' or use for mulch.
I did read that buckwheat needs bees to pollinate, BTW. But that if you work the whole plant into the soil when it just starts to flower, it's a terrific "manure" additive.
So enjoy reading your blogs, Dave!
Lin W, Abigail. If my carrots are sort of normal I don't peel them. I pull them, let them soak a bit, give them a good wash and scrub them with a nail-brush that I keep for that. The few bits of dirt that may survive that will boost our immune systems... but these are NOT normal carrots. They're twisty, bumpy, often multi-rooted, usually entrants for the rude vegetable award, and it takes scrubbing, peeling and then a knife to get them even reasonably clean!
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