At the end of the last blog I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Ha! We have beaten you at your own game, Mr Badger. I shouldn’t have spoken so soon. Mr Badger (and his family probably) came along that night for his supper to find that all the rest of the best of the carrots had magically disappeared. Did he cry and go home with his little tail between his legs? Oh no! He/they decided to see if the rest of the carrots were ready – and some of them were – and ate all of those and dug up the rest just for a laugh. In fact, I’m pretty sure badgers have a sense of humour: having discovered the destruction of the carrot bed, I immediately raked it over, threw in some blood fish and bone and sowed lines of rocket, dill, coriander, basil and fennel.  That made me feel a lot better, turning something negative into a positive and all that. Until that is, I popped over to the allotment this evening to pick broad beans to find a large hole in the middle of my seeded bed where Mr Badger had sniffed out a forgotten carrot. 

It wasn’t just us (which I admit, makes me feel a bit better). Poor Lindsey, the ‘hungry’ badger family had all eight rows of her Chantenay carrots and even dug up some parsnips to be sure that they weren’t carrots too (Badgers have bad eyesight and don’t like parsnips). She’s gutted. Our lovely carrots had been grown under enviromesh and so were perfectly clean from carrot fly. I had even wondered if the mesh would somehow disguise the smell of carrots from badgers. Obviously not. Lesson learned. Next year I am going to grow carrots in a wooden box in our badger-safe back-yard.

Home-grown carrots (when you actually get to eat them) taste so different from shop-bought ones. They are sweeter but have a much stronger taste. I know this is true because last year my youngest son, Aaron, said he didn’t like our carrots because ‘they tasted different’. At the time, it really hurt me to buy bagged-up carrots from the supermarket so that he would eat them. It seems that supermarket carrots have lost a lot of their flavour by the time they get to the table. Also, on the news this week I heard that when cut-up carrots are cooked they lose 25% of their anti-cancer properties. Well, I can put that smug look back on my face. On Friday evening (the night we had pulled the carrots in defence of the badger) we had a dinner party and I served whole carrots as a side dish to the lemon and garlic chicken. Lindsey gave me this recipe and the carrots are beautiful. I would use organic carrots because you don’t peel the skins. Just give them a scrub and wrap them in foil with a knob of butter. I can’t really say how long they take to cook as it depends on how big they are, how soft you like them and how many you cook at once, but they should be ready between 30 minutes and an hour (sorry not to be more accurate, I’d had a couple of glasses of wine by that point).