Hello! Happy Ground Hog Day! Who cares what the Ground Hog says after the wild ride we’ve had. Look outside! It really looks like 6 more YEARS of winter!

Ah, life in the North Country – gotta love it! Yeah – love it or leave it! That’s easy for some people to say – all of the Snow Bunnies are sitting nice and pretty down south while the rest of us have to fend for ourselves.

At this point in time, acute cabin fever is a very common malady right about now. But there is a cure. Let’s talk gardens. Let’s break those frigid chains of winter oppression and depression that are holding us down in those snow drifts. Come on, rise up! Shake off that snow! Grab a hot cup of coffee, or tea, or cocoa, or whatever else floats your boat (or warms your boat!). Let’s sit back, sip our beverage of choice, and concentrate really hard on happy things – spring things – green things.

Actually let’s start with some orange things and then move on from there. Let’s finish up with carrot varieties.

Have a sweet tooth? Then think Sugar Snax carrot. Johnny’s Selected Seeds calls this one a high beta carotene beauty for health. And beta carotene is one of those new fangled anti-oxidants that fight free radicals and cancer. Beta carotene is a very important source of vitamin A.

Sugar Snax is very, very sweet. Remember us talking about baby carrots? Well, real baby carrots are real small and real sweet. Then there are those baby cut carrots. Baby cut baby carrots are real long, real sweet, but not real baby sized carrots. Those baby cut carrots are long regular size carrots that are cut into 3 or 4 smaller pieces and then whittled down real small to make them look like the real small real baby carrots.

Besides the size factor, the real difference between baby carrots and the regular size carrots is the sweetness factor. Real baby carrots are really sweeter than most regular carrots. But there are a few regular size carrot varieties that are exceptionally sweet. Yes, not all carrots are created equal. So – baby cut carrots are the regular sized carrots that are whittled down to make baby cut baby carrots. Hmm……. Baby wanna-be’s!

It so happens that Sugar Snax is one of those varieties of exceptionally sweet regular size carrots. Actually I think that Sugar Snax carrots are much sweeter than many of the real baby carrots I’ve tasted. Hey – you be the judge. Get your hands on Sugar Snax carrot seed and plant them in your garden this season. Then you can taste the difference for yourself. Hey – you can even take your full size Sugar Snax carrots and cut them down to look like the real baby size carrots. Yeah, right! Why bother?

At any rate, moving away from carrot colors, carrots sizes, carrot taste, let’s move on to carrot seed, as in carrot seed size. When you buy a regular size packet of regular carrot seeds (or even the real baby carrot seed), you usually get what seems like a million microscopic carrot seed. Then you sprinkle this carrot seed “dust” over your prepared seed bed. You wait forever for the carrot seed to germinate, and then you find they are coming up way to close to one another. So you spend the rest of the season thinning them out to allow at least some of them sufficient space to size up (room to grow). What a waste! A waste of seed, of time, effort, and potential carrots.

Well, consider using pelletized carrot seed! This is regular sized, ittsy, bitsy, teenie, weenie carrot seed that is encapsulated (encased) in a clay coating, making the seed larger than life. This clay coating splits up or dissolves when that planted pellet hits moisture. This larger kind of pelletized carrot seed is much more user friendly, much easier to handle, much easier to space, much easier to plant than carrot “dust”.

More on pelletized seed next week . . .

But for this week – be careful on the roads. Be careful in your own driveway! And remember to thank that Punxsutawney Phil and Mother Nature for all of this. I have two words for the two of them – and it isn’t “Happy Birthday”!

Remember – Eat Smart New York!

And – Bye – Talk to you soon!
D