How to grow carrots
This morning I pulled the first wonderful sweet carrots of the season. In celebration, and knowing that lots of people have trouble getting carrots underway, I thought I would share my method. This has worked for me in several different gardens, ranging from sandy acid soil to sandy alkaline and now to my present acid clay. It is proved fool proof (by me).
The first thing to understand about carrots is that they must be nurtured and molly-coddled for the first 14 days after you sow the seed. After that, they can survive an astonishing amount of neglect.
First things first. Make sure the soil doesn’t have too much fresh manure or compost or blood and bone, since all of these will cause the carrots to fork, giving you a hard-to-use or unusable crop. Best to sow carrot seed in soil that grew a well fertilised crop - such as tomatoes or sweetcorn or pumpkin - the previous season.
Second, don’t bother with seedlings! Carrots should be sown direct and not transplanted if you want good straight roots.
Sow the fine, sand-like seed either in rows or by scattering. It can help to mix the seed with sawdust or sand to help to spread it evenly, but I must admit I don’t usually bother with this anymore. Cover with soil. Remember, you are aiming to bury the seed only three times the size of the seed, and since carrots seed are tiny, you don’t need to cover them deeply. If you like, sow a few radishes with the carrots. They will come up and crop earlier than the carrots and help to break up the soil for them, and mark the rows.
Having sown the seed, you must now peform a very important step. Literally. STOMP on your seed! Ignore all those gardening books that tell you not to compact the soil. I have found it is crucial with carrots to make sure the seed and the soil are in firm contact. So stamp all over the rows or patch. Then, water well.
Now you have a choice. For 14 days the soil over your seed must be kept constantly damp. You can do this either by watering at least once and probably twice a day, or if you know you won’t do this, then you can cover the seed with cardboard, hessian, an old sheet - anything to stop the soil drying out. If you do the latter, then you will probably be able to get away with a watering every two or three days, depending temperature and how well your soil retains moisture.
At about the ten day mark check the seeds daily. As soon as you see little two leaf seedlings emerging, take off any coverings. Keep up the watering for another day or two, and you will see the seedlings begin to take on the characteristic feathery leaf look of carrots. At this point you can begin to relax. The roots soon begin to reach down to the deeper levels, and seem to survive pretty well on normal rainfall and perhaps the occasional deep watering.
Most gardening books are very strict about thinning out. They say to begin thinning almost as soon as the seedlings emerge. I used to do this, and it broke my heart. What a waste! These days I don’t bother. I let the lot grow, and harvest the big ones first. I find the other ones, which have been crowded, then usually get a move on and fill up the space. This, admittedly, works better in lighter soils where the roots can push about a bit than in my present clay, but it still works even here! It helps to space the crop, too, rather than having a whole lot of uniformly sized carrots all at once.
Now, harvesting. When you pull your carrots, take the leaves off STRAIGHT AWAY. If you leave them on, they rob the carrot of that magic, fresh-pulled sweetness. This takes only about half an hour to happen! Harvest only what you need when you need it for maximum freshness. Carrots is one of those vegetables you have never really tasted until you have had one fresh!
Always try one carrot there in the garden, washed down with the hose. The taste fresh from the ground is beyond compare.
Hope all this works for you!
Tags: gardening, how-to, seed, Vegetables
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POSTED IN: How to Grow Stuff, Vegetables
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