See this picture of me and the farm apprentices celebrating beautiful bunches of carrots?
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The joy, the beauty, the bounty. Looking at us you would never guess that two months before we were on our knees, for hours at a time, thinning miniscule carrot plants. Thinning? Yes, thinning. Carrots have a notoriously low germination rate so when you plant them you have to put a lot of seed down. Which means that when they sprout you get a thick row of them that then need to be thinned to about an inch apart, to make room for a full grown carrot. If you don't thin them, you'll get thousands of smushed tiny carrots and none of them will get big enough to eat. You also have to hand-weed as you go. It's a slow, sometimes tedious, sometimes meditative process, that makes you really, really appreciate the carrots when you finally harvest them.
Carrots were the first thing I seeded in the ground this season (on April 1st) so they carry a special magic. And as a first-time farm manager, I watched over them intently, coming out every day to see if they had germinated, not quite believing that they would. And then came a heat wave. Our irrigation wasn't set up fully so in moment of stress, I came out to the fields and started handwatering them in with a watering can. I needed to save the carrots. About a hundred feet down the bed I realized it was ridiculous, that I would be out till midnight at the rate I was going, and I would have to accept that I might lose them to the heat. By the next week, the carrots had germinated beautifully. Maybe all of my anxiety was actually a growth-promoter. And now in mid-July, we are at the tail end of another long heat wave, and we are harvesting those carrots I watched over like an anxious mother. There is nothing quite as sweet.
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