CARROTS ARE HARD

An intersection point in my carrot bed this morning. To the left, carrots and beetroot protected over night under netting. To the right, what remains of the marauders banquet!

Carrots, those humble root vegetables that are the foundation of so much of the human diet across cultures and continents, are hard. Yep. I just typed that.

I mean it both literally and figuratively. Of course, the long, tapered roots of carrots are indeed dense, crisp, and crunchy, especially when they’re super fresh. But they also represent something metaphorical. Growing carrots is tough, and in my new world of growing stuff, they have come to symbolise success and failure, lessons learned, and dashed hopes—all at the same time.

I have a walking meditation I do every morning. I move along each bed in my garden (that’s 310 linear metres of growing, spread across 20 beds), intentionally soaking in the space, the sun, the wind, the rain, while also quietly noting who is doing well and who is not. I register where water is needed, where insects have invaded, and who has been pushed over by the torrent of wind. Most days its a beautiful routine I’ve carved for myself.

But, on these walks, it’s impossible not to notice when a beds has been decimated in the past 24 hours by marauding wildlife. I’ll admit, in these moments, my meditative state dissolves and my calm morphs into a torrent of swear words.

This is where carrots come into my story. Their tops are the favoured snack of a brushtail possum and its friends, who have worked out how to break into an area I foolishly believed was as safe as Fort Knox. It might seem like their feast shouldn’t damage my crop, but without leaves, carrot roots stop growing. They’re frozen in time, like thin orange pencils, putting their harvest months behind schedule.

About now, I can hear you wondering: ‘Why are you telling me this, Margi? Your writing is about surviving climate change—surely carrots aren’t that relevant.’ But here’s the thing: carrots are a tough crop to grow. They are super persnickety about germinating and take an age to mature. They don’t like to be crowded, but neither do they like to be alone. Their seeds are tiny and really hard to space by hand, so most of us growing on a budget are forced to spend hours, bent double, thinning them as they get bigger. They want the soil just so, and the temperature perfect. They sulk when it’s too hot and hunker down like petulant children when it’s too cold. Plenty of insects, nematodes, and heaven knows who else love to eat them underground, so you diligently tend your crop only to find at harvest time half of each root is missing, or rotted, or twisted into something bizarre and frightening. Oh, merde! If they weren’t delicious and genuinely brilliant nutrition, pretty much every market gardener would give them up—me included. Those magic orange roots you expect to get in cheap bags at the supermarket or haggle over at the farmers’ market because ‘Hell, they’re only carrots!’ don’t materialise with ease.

All this means there is skill and knowledge in the growing, and that’s just one small part of life. Imagine all the skill and knowledge needed for everything else humans require to survive: growing potatoes, lettuce, apples, or pears; storing water; cutting firewood; fixing machinery; sharpening a saw; making biofuel; mending clothes. Take a moment to look at all the components of your day and imagine no more supermarket, no more petrol station, no more high street or big box store, no more internet. No more central heating or water in the tap. All those ingredients in your ready meal or that bottle of pasta sauce—where did they come from? And more to the point, what are they? Are you ready to do all that yourself?

Not long ago, I found myself in a conversation with a self-declared prepper who proudly announced they’d bought a big cache of ‘survival seeds’. When I asked what that meant, they rattled off a list of crops—all ones I grow, including carrots. They planned to start growing them when the ‘shit hit’. Hand on heart, I knew there’d be no real food coming from that prepper’s garden for at least six weeks, probably closer to 3 months, after their seeds hit the soil. Carrots, surely a staple food in tough times, would be a full 4.5 months before harvest—assuming they had the soil deep enough to accommodate them and they were planted in the right season. If not, my earnest prepper could be waiting even longer. Their diet in the meantime? Radishes and lettuce—assuming they could keep their crops safe from everything else that loves to snack on them. Again … my carrots!

And all that assumes their seeds would remain viable. People get this impression seeds just last. They do—if you’re the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and have absolutely perfect conditions from collection through storage. But those packs of vegetable seeds you get from the store? Most will last a few years, if that. Then the grower needs to know what the hell they’re doing to make sure a crop materialises. Yep … carrots … case in point.

I am becoming a broken record on this, but I’m going to keep saying it until I see evidence people are acting: a cache of ‘survival seeds’ is not enough. Nor is a year’s supply of tinned beans and corn. Equally, waiting until times are tough before you start adapting to the looming climate chaos hellscape is too late. Survival is association with skill and knowledge—either your own or someone else’s.

So, please, shut your computer now and go outside to talk with your neighbour. Find your nearest food grower or community gardener and get to know them, too. Start talking with people in your community about what they know, the skills they bring, and how you’ll collectively weather the coming storms, because you’ll need people—real, breathing, capable people—when wildfires tear through your town or floods drown your streets, or the food shipped in from distant shores stops coming. Your stockpile of beans and a ‘go bag’ won’t cut it. Nor will that ‘vibrant, online community’ you are so invested in. It’s the real-world people who’ll chainsaw the tree off your car, drag you out of the mud, grow your food, filter your water, or feed your kids when you’re too gutted to function who’ll make the difference. Community isn’t some fluffy ideal—it’s survival. Alone, you’ll drown in the chaos.

Life, out from under the blanket of the ‘tech-industrial complex,’ needs skill and knowledge. If you don’t have it, find those who do and help them. Roll up your sleeves and support others in whatever way you can. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, wait for a government agency to come and do it for you. They won’t. Increasingly, they can’t.

And because growing carrots is hard, those who know how could use your support more than ever.

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P.S. If you’re a grower—or want to be one—I highly recommend the No-Till Growers Network podcasts. They’re brilliant and absolutely worth your time.