new agriculture
natural cycle
weeds
rermineralisation
1500# pear tree
350# tomato trees
Canada thistle
perfect carrots
new agri news
agri resources
invitation
other agri sites
|
|
|
We've always grown about 400 feet of carrots for our own year-round supply, and for sale to the public. And at harvest time, I always used two wheelbarrows; one for the good carrots, and one for the carrots that had carrot rust fly larva tracks all over them.
|
|
And I usually ended up with one wheelbarrow of good carrots to every three barrows of 'bad' carrots - until that year when we had a whole lot of parsley growing among the carrots. To my endless surprise, I kept filling up the good barrow again and again, while the 'bad' barrow remained empty, with nary a 'bad' carrot anywhere. This was astonishing.
There was not a single carrot rustfly-marked carrot, until I came to very end of the row, where no parsley had grown among the carrots. Now this is remarkable, and doubly so, because all of the Dept. of Agri recommendations say to keep parsley as far away from carrots as possible. This, according to them, is because parsley is closely related to carrots, and parsley is a natural host of the carrot rust fly and will attract all kinds of them. But, the evidence to the contrary was clear and indisputable.
Now I did not intend to have lots of parsley among the carrots; not at all; I knew the recommendations after all. The carrot rust fly is enough of a huge problem without making it worse and attracting hordes of them to my carrots. And all that parsley among the carrots got there by reasons of vanity, actually.
You see, I was in my late 40ties then, and had acquired the usual male blue-eyed farsightedness by then, and was too proud to wear glasses. And I always let at least one parsley bush to go to seed every year, both as a host for insect predators, and so we would have lots of self-sown parsley in our market gardens.
Alas, and due to my newly acquired farsightedness, I could not tell the difference between parsley and carrot seedlings anymore when weeding our carrot beds, and just because I did not want to surrender to eyeglasses, we ended up with a lot of parsley among the carrots. And about every 5th plant turned out to be parsley, instead of carrot. But instead of an unmitigated disaster, I ended up with just the opposite. Barrows and barrows full of perfect carrots. I was delighted.
As it happened, a good friend of ours, also an organic market gardener, invited us for Thanksgiving dinner that weekend. When we arrived I told him that I had some very good news to tell him, to which he replied that he had great good news as well. And he proceeded to tell me about his carrots, and how lots of parsley had cropped up among his carrots that year - for the very same reasons it had cropped up among ours - and how all but a few had turned out to be perfect. And he beamed from ear to ear, proud and happy about his remarkable and astonishing discovery.
And then he asked me what my good new was. Well, by then there wasn't anything left to tell other than that his good news had been my good news as well. But then we marvelled at the uncanny coincidence, and how the two of us, although some twenty miles apart, had achieved exactly the same results - albeit accidentally - by exactly the same means.
Needless to say, from then on both of us grew our carrots among lots of parsley, except that I finally did get eyeglasses, and from then on let lots of parsley grow between the carrot rows, instead of in the rows. From then on, and year after year, both of us had nothing but perfect carrots, and our former carrot rust fly problems drifted further and further into a long gone past.
And as a bonus, we had lots and lots of fresh parsley, for us, for our customers, and more than plenty left over for drying.
|
|
|
