Dig next to the carrots so you can pull them out easily without scraping them up. If your soil is dense, you may need to use a small garden shovel or fork. Pull the carrots right out of the ground.So here’s what you do to keep them fresh as long as you can. But let’s get them to last as long as possible. That’s fine, but they won’t last forever and won’t even last as long as most grocery store carrots. Let’s say you don’t have a dark, cold place to store harvested carrots, but you don’t want to leave them in the ground. Making Garden Carrots Last After Harvesting Place the container in a cool, dark place and store them there until you’re ready to use them.Cover the carrots with more sand, dirt, or sawdust.Place the carrots on top of the sand, dirt, or sawdust.Place some damp sand, dirt, or sawdust in the bottom of a container.This works great if you have a cool, dark place (like a root cellar) to store food. So if you want them to remain ground fresh, but don’t want to leave them out for other animals to devour, you may want to consider a hybrid option. Once the ground warms up again, your carrots will start growing again and if they get too big they can split or turn tough and bitter.Īnother problem with keeping them in the ground is that animals like moles (and yes, even those rascally rabbits) may harvest them for you. That said, make sure to use them up before spring.

It’s true that they’ll be harder to dig up if the ground freezes solid, but they’ll stay fresh as long as they’re in the ground. The very best way to keep your garden-grown carrots fresh all year is actually to not harvest them until you’re ready to use them. So just wash them, peel them, and use them in your favorite recipe that uses cooked carrots. Remember, just because a carrot has gone soft, doesn’t mean it’s not usable! If you’re not making a cooked dish that requires carrots, why not try a side of Super Simple Spicy Grilled Carrots? It’s an extremely simple recipe a neighbor shared with me a few years ago that we make all the time because it’s so easy and so good! That’s where soft carrots can be really great! I often end up with crunchy carrots mixed in with lots of other soft, cooked vegetables. If your carrots aren’t totally repulsive, you can still use them.Ĭarrots that are a little soft work great in any recipe that uses cooked carrots.įresh carrots are really crisp, and in recipes with cooked carrots, they can be difficult to soften enough. If so, there’s one more thing you can do… Using Carrots that have Gone Soft But depending on how soft your carrots have gotten, it may be too late for that. The carrots will absorb some of the water and that may bring some crispness back to your carrots. Place the carrots in a bowl of cool water. If you have carrots that have already gone soft, there’s really only one thing you can try. Temperature won’t guarantee freshness, though, since storing your carrots in a refrigerator won’t prevent them from going soft. They wash them in cold water, dry them with cool air, and store them in a cold place. To make the carrots last as long as possible, the people that pack the carrots you buy from the store are keeping the carrots really cool. But they’re not bred to last forever on a shelf. The carrots you grow are almost certainly better tasting and may be better in other ways. The stuff they sell at the store has been bred over countless generations to have a long shelf life. This can be said about pretty much all produce. The main reason that happens, is that you didn’t plan the same variety of carrots that the grocery store suppliers did. Okay, so what’s the deal? I get fresh, organic carrots straight from my garden and they get all rotten looking in a week, but those ones at the store seem to last forever! Why Garden Carrots Go Soft and Grocery Store Carrots Don’t And there are definitely some things you can do to keep them fresh longer, even through the winter. As cleaned carrots slowly dry out, their cells actually get less rigid making them soft and really unappetizing.īut depending on how soft they are there may be a solution. So why do carrots from the garden get soft while my grocery store carrots don’t? Garden variety carrots get soft when they lose internal moisture or if they start to rot. So I dug them all up, cleaned them off, and put them in the refrigerator only to find that 2 days later, they were soft and limp. The first year I had a successful carrot crop, I was so excited.

Carrots in cold weather