How to Dry and Use Carrot Greens

Wondering if you can eat carrot greens (carrot leaves)? You can! Find out exactly how to dry carrot greens and get recipes for how to eat them fresh! Don’t let your carrot tops go to waste! Using them is easy and nutritious!

Every year, we grow a large vegetable garden, and it always produces some of the biggest veggies I’ve ever seen in my life! This includes homegrown carrots and their gorgeous, long greens!

The first time we ended up with a wheelbarrow full of carrots! Since I don’t like to waste anything, I immediately started researching if carrot greens are safe to eat, and then started looking for recipes for carrot leaves (carrot greens).

Turns out they are safe to eat, and we have been enjoying them ever since!

You may find a lot of conflicting information on this front… Bottom line, homegrown carrot tops are not poisonous, but just be sure that you are actually eating organic carrot tops that you grew and not ones where harsh pesticides may have been used.

Just be really careful to avoid wild carrot green which have poisonous lookalikes!

How to Dry and Use Carrot Tops

As I was harvesting carrots for canning, I also needed to deal with the carrot greens if I was going to keep them! Here is how we process our carrot leaves for long-term storage.

There are other ways to use your carrot tops fresh later in the post!

1. Prep – First, chop the green off just ABOVE the carrot top, so there isn’t any actual carrot left on the greens. Then wash the greens well to remove bugs and debris.
2. Dry – The first time I dried my carrot greens, I started by putting them in the dehydrator at 95° until fully dried. However, the greens from my carrots were so huge that I could only fit 2 carrots’ worth in my 5 tray Excalibur dehydrator at a time! That wasn’t going to work at all… So eventually I just bundled them in 5 carrot top bunches (after rinsing them well), tied them up with twine, and hung them from my pot rack to dry. It took a lot longer for them to dry this way over the dehydrator method, but I was able to do more at a time, and it was silent and hands-off! Whatever method you use, make sure they are thoroughly dried before continuing.
3. Separate – Once the carrot tops are completely dried, remove them from the bundles or trays and start picking off the leaves. I chose to just keep the leaves and give the stems to the chickens. This allows them to be more of an herb when used in cooking.

4. Store – Once you have all the leaves stripped off the stems, just add them to a glass jar for long-term storage. This is a half-gallon mason jar, and it’s more than halfway full… and that’s just the leaves from 5 carrot tops!! I could have crushed them down more, but I just hadn’t at this point.

How to Eat Carrot Tops and Carrot Greens

I’m sure you can come up with more ideas for carrot top recipes, but here are some of the ways we’ve been enjoying them!

• Make a carrot top pesto! This is great on pasta and can be frozen for later!
• Add 3 tablespoons to chicken bone broth soup
• Add 2 tablespoons to a gallon of herbal tea (it’s SO good!)
• Crush and sprinkle over a green salad for some extra vitamin C
• Add to spaghetti sauce
• Sprinkle onto a homemade pizza
• … and basically any other way you would use parsley or spinach!

Carrot Top Nutrition

Although I haven’t been able to find an official government analysis, it’s reasonable to assume that carrot tops probably have a nutritional makeup that is similar to their roots. This would imply that carrot tops provide vitamins A, B6, C and K, folate, manganese, niacin, potassium and thiamin when eaten.

This article from Only Foods even goes so far as to say that carrot greens have up to 6x more Vitamin C than carrots themselves and are high in chlorophyll. I’m not sure of the validity of the statement, but there it is!

More Easy Recipes for Using Your Carrots and Carrot Greens!

• Carrot Top Pesto (perfect on pasta!)
• Easy Vegetable Soup
• Classic Carrot Raisin Salad

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