Carrots

Carrots are one of the kid favorites from the garden. Most years, we can barely get the kids to hold off harvesting until they’ve had a chance to grow, and unlike tomatoes or apples, they’re just as good when they’re small (and quite a bit better than when they’re too big).

One problem though. They’re completely unreliable. I’m told carrots should be sown directly into the soil, no inside starting necessary, but some years I broadcast the sesame-like seeds and we have a bed full of carrots. Other years, nothing grows. I’ve asked around to lots of very experienced gardeners and their response boils down to, “Yeah. Carrots are like that.”

It’s infuriating. It’s even more infuriating because the climate we live in is not always the most friendly to baby plants. Well, it’s really, really friendly to ferns and moss and blackberries. But anything that needs sun and warmth either has to wait until June or give up.

So last spring, in a fit of pique, I prepared a tray of carrots in our usual indoor seed starter. And man did they grow! It turns out that if you give carrot seeds perfectly nourished soil, direct light for 12 hours a day, and twice daily watering, they are quite happy to grow. Hundreds and hundreds of plants.

Of course, it’s rather foolish, because each of those hundreds of plants needed to be transplanted into the garden bed, a task that I was conveniently too busy to do. Forrest bit the bullet and took care of it. (He’s gentler with the transplants than I am anyway, so really, it’s for the best.) And those carrots thrived.

I try not to think about the ridiculous hours of work we put in, just for a hundred or so carrots. A carrot at the store comes to about a quarter, and that’s if it’s full sized. Meanwhile, my kids are yanking little baby carrots out of the ground with no awareness of the care that went into it. Nor should they. There’s a reason you don’t start carrots inside.

When we start pumpkins inside, we start about 5 plants, maybe 10 if we’ve got time. And we end up with about 20-30 pumpkins. It’s the same for tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini. A lot of bang for the buck.

So why did we do it? And why will we definitely do it again next year?

Because, most days, when the twins get home from school, they dump their backpacks on the sidewalk and drop their coats and run into the garden. They yank out a few dirt-covered carrots and wipe them on their pants or sleeves or, if they’re smart enough, the grass. And then they joyfully crunch their way through the hours of effort that Forrest and I put in.

Isn’t that parenting in a nutshell? You put in a thousand hours of thought and time and hard work and then your kids come along and munch it up, not realizing for a second what it cost. Sometimes I want them to, and we have lots of conversations about appreciation and pitching in and not leaving sneakers all over the kitchen floor where someone will trip on them.

But sometimes I want them to have no idea at all what their joy cost. I want it to feel free, abundant, a small miracle there for the taking. There is a place for gratitude but there is also a place for wonder. And those little carrots are sometimes the most wonderful things of all.