Last year's carrots

Last week I finally got to digging up my garden carrots. These are the carrots I left in the ground over winter. This is a good way to store carrots over the winter.

The problem is that I waited too long to dig the carrots from the ground. The frost has been out of the ground for weeks now.

As you can see I covered the carrots with tarps to prevent moisture from reaching them. I figured this would give me extra time from when the frost left the ground. The problem is that moisture did somehow get under the tarps as the ground was the same wetness out of and under the tarps. It was like the tarps weren't even there.

Most all the carrots were rotting away. I should have filled two to three 5 gallon pails, and all I got were 20 carrots. These 20 carrots do taste better than the carrots I dug last year and stored in my house's crawl space over winter.

The mice liked the tarps as I found trails under the tarps. The mice got fat on my carrots! One mouse tried to run after I lifted the tarp but it was so fat it couldn't run fast. Now it is a dead mouse.