Our Permaculture Life: 5 Uses for Your Carrot Greens

5 Uses for Your Carrot Greens

Carrot tops are wonderfully edible and nutritious. Whenever carrots are growing in my garden, the carrot tops are sure to end up in a soup, stir-fry or salad.  Eating the greens from root crops more than doubles the produce from that part of the garden.

Carrot is one of the fifty-five plants I talk about in my new film coming out in the next days....
I pick the leaves continuously while I wait for the carrot root to be ready for harvest.  I prefer them nice and fresh, picked straight from the garden - particularly when the plant is fairy young. I think the flavour is nice this way.

Here's a few ways I use carrot tops:
  1. carrot top in vegetable soup 
  2. carrot top chopped in salad, mixed with other leafy greens and legumes
  3. carrot top as a stir fry leafy green
  4. carrot top added to pesto
  5. carrot top added to juice
Use your carrot greens - they are a valuable food too.
It does take a long time for carrot roots to be ready for harvest (12-18 weeks) - but this way my carrot patch is producing food from just a 4 weeks after planting.  They are full of potassium, calcium, chlorophyll and other nutrients, rich in protein and have six times the vitamin C of the root.


Carrot tops look a lot like Italian parsley or celery - both of the same family (Apiaceae)

I love foraging for a diversity of interesting greens for my meals. There are many other plants that have edible leafy greens - beetroot, pumpkin, sweet potato, snow pea for example.  Just be careful when you're buying carrots, I'd probably avoid eating non-organic carrot tops in case they have been sprayed.

Have fun and experiment!







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