Pulling Carrots

I pulled carrots today.  This month has been very dry so even though it rained on and off today the ground was very hard.  There is a technique to pulling carrots.  If you're not careful you end up with a handful of greens and no carrot.  Only the carrots with shoulders above the sand level can be pulled out easily.  I grasp the green stalks and wiggle in a circular motion.  If the carrot won't budge, stop pulling.  Dig it out with a shovel.  I had to use a shovel on 80% of the carrots today.  They were in there tight.  And the ground was hard too.  Even when I stepped on the shovel with both feet at the same time, it wouldn't penetrate the hard soil.  Eventually I got all my carrots out.  I dug up potatoes and garlic as well.  I found lots of cutworms as I dug in the dirt.  I don't like cutworms.  They cut off my transplants in the spring.  If you try to cut them with a shovel, they generally just sink into the ground and survive.  So I threw them.  Every cut worm I found, and I found at least 20, was thrown as far as I could throw - maybe 10 feet away from the garden at most.  Was that far enough?  I know voles travel a quarter of an acre but I don't know about cutworms.  I hope I threw them far enough.   The entire job took almost two hours and would have been a lot easier if it wasn't for the swarms of gnats.  The gnats were flying around my face when I stood up. When I knelt closer to the earth, the gnats were even thicker and flew into my eyes and nose. One of the gnats bit me in the eyelid.  I look like I have very thick dramatic makeup on one eye but not the other.