Bright orange, crunchy and delicious…we love carrots. Especially the dogs, so much so that we had to build a cage around them this year because Basil just assumes that we planted a patch of treats for her to eat at her leisure.

This will be the last year for our raised beds. They were only ever meant to be a temporary means for growing veggies while we landscaped and terraced our sloped yard. Now that the permanent beds will be ready for the spring, we will be taking them out. So we didn’t go hog-wild with planting a huge variety this year. All of our work has gone into the rock walls, meaning we have neglected gardening a bit this year. But, to make the most of our beds, we ended up planting an entire raised bed with carrots. We had originally had some beets in there as well but they died for some reason and so we replanted that space with more carrots.

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We have been happily harvesting them for a few weeks now. Adding them to salads or roasting them on the BBQ, and we still have so many more to get us through to the fall. The rows seem to have been timed perfectly for the rate at which we are eating them. We planted two rows every two weeks for the first month and a half.

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Now that we are finally experiencing our summer heatwave, which is very late in arriving…not that I am complaining since I imagine it is what ants feel like under a magnifying glass…it is time to start sheltering in the air conditioning until the yard has some shade to sit in, which is around 6:30pm. I was a little squirrely sitting around the house the other day so I braved the laser beam and harvested a bundle of carrots to do some baking and prep for dinner.

For dinner, I decided on an Asian carrot coleslaw. You guessed it, the main ingredient is carrot! I added green onion, spring onion, purple basil and thyme from our garden. Our neighbour had given us one of their huge heads of broccoli, so I added some of that as well. It was all finished with an Asian dressing and toasted sesame seeds. It was amazing. So refreshing on a hot day. I will post the recipe for it soon in case you wanted to give it a whirl.

I was craving a carrot cake, so I used most of the remaining carrot making a carrot coffee cake. Delicious carrot cake, topped with streusel and drizzled with cream cheese icing. It is very rich and delicious. I’m not going to lie, as much as I love cream cheese icing, I would definitely reduce the amount next time and try to thin it out a little more for a more even drizzle rather than globbing it on the top. I will also share this recipe soon since it is too good to keep to myself.

I had a few carrots left, so the dogs got a couple as a treat and for not begging too much while I was in the kitchen. The rest, I decided to make cookies with. I went with a “healthier” cookie since we were going to be clogging our arteries and expanding our waistline with the cake. They are tasty, but I don’t love them. They are quite dry, so if I made them again, some sort of icing would need to go on them, or perhaps a tweak of the recipe to make them a bit more moist. I will also share this recipe, which I encourage anyone making it to play with and tell me if you are able to adjust it to make it easier to eat without a big glass of milk or water. I will also try it again and see if I can make it better.

I imagine our carrot patch in the future will continue to be large and a main staple of the garden. The dogs may revolt otherwise!