Digging Fresh Winter Carrots

I am still in the process of turning over my garden beds this winter.  I usually wait until we have a little warm spell so the soil is easy to turn.  There has been a couple of rainy snow storms recently so the soil was nice and moist which is much easier to work with than when it's super dry or frozen.
The bed that I turned over last was planted in turnips over the summer with a row of carrots down the middle.  I had harvested the turnips so long ago that I forgot that there was still a crop of carrots in the bed.  Imagine my surprise when I turned over a shovelful of carrots instead of dirt!  After that discovery I was more careful turning over the rest of the bed and was rewarded with a nice flat of purple and orange carrots.

I did have a few carrots that had turned to mush, but there were still plenty of good carrots left.  I am going to dehydrate some of these to add to a dry soup mix and the nicest ones will get eaten in the next few days.  I may also use a couple for a batch of stock if I can find the time.

Carrots are a crop that I have been using to break up the soil in my yard.  I had very hard packed clay when I started these beds, but now after just a couple of years the soil is much looser and easier to work with.  The carrot roots reach deep into the soil and bring up buried nutrients that will become available to feed the future crops in this bed.  When I finished digging out all the carrots I added more fire pit ashes and another bag of fall leaves to the soil, and mixed it all together. Over the next couple of months these amendments will break down into compost to feed the next season's crops.