Carrots Are Worth the Challenge

I grew carrots again this year. They are a bit of a challenge because it is best to sow them directly in the garden and they are slow to start. The seedlings will not appear for at least two weeks, and if the weather is cold, they may take longer. The seeds are small, so you will plant them not too deeply, maybe 1/4 inch below the surface, or at most 1/2 inch. Because soil dries from the surface first, you will need to keep the moisture topped off until the seedlings are well up. You can't just walk away and return to water every few days and expect to see seedlings in a week. For carrots you need to remember to water lightly (briefly) every day or two for weeks. And weed every couple of days too, since the weeds will grow much faster than the carrots and compete with them.

These carrot seedlings are about a month and a half old. There are a few weeds, but there would have been many more had I not been weeding a lot.

Once they are up, carrot seedlings start out tiny and grow slowly. The roots probably reach a little deeper into the soil than the shoots do into the air, but they are still shallow, so you still have to pay attention to the frequency of your light watering to be sure that the roots are able to get water. 

You want thick roots, so you don't want carrots to grow too close together. Try to sow the seed a half inch to an inch apart. Then, when the plants are well up, thin any that are growing too close together--cheek and jowl, that is. (The joke is that if you sow them too far apart, only some seeds will germinate leaving you with not enough carrots, whereas if you sow the seed close together, they will all come up.) You can thin out the smallest plants, or you can wait and take out the bigger ones when they are big enough to offer a bite to eat. (The first plan will get you mature carrots faster.) 

When the carrots are grown, the leaves are a foot and a half tall and the plants will seem so sturdy that you will wonder that they could ever have been so small. Carrots take about 3 months to mature, so you can make the guess that they will be ready then. Brush away the surface soil and look at the top of the carrot to judge its size. In general, a wide top to the root will mean a mature carrot.

 

But there will always be a bit of guesswork in estimating carrot size, and some will always get bigger than others.

(Our instinct says to stick the smaller ones back in the ground where maybe they will grow bigger, but this won't work. Although a carrot root is fat and sturdy, it was, before you pulled it, attached to many tiny roots that extended widely and deeply. Of course they all broke off when you pulled the carrot,  and it is unlikely to grow more fast enough to help  it grow much, so you may as well eat it.)

This image of carrot roots is from the book Roots Demystified  by Robert Kourick. He obtained it from Root Development of Vegetable Crops, by John Weaver and William Brumer. The squares in the grid equal 1 square foot.

When you pull out a carrot, it is a kindness to the remaining carrots to push soil gently against them, if they were exposed by the hole you made.  This helps the remaining carrots retain moisture. 

For many years, I grew carrots in a backyard bed that emerged from the shade of the house only in early April. I sowed the seed in mid-February, so the seed germinated, and the very young seedlings grew, in the shade. Then, when the house shadow got shorter, they were in sunlight, and they grew faster. They were ready to harvest by mid-June. But then, two years ago, tunneling rats ate my crop. All of it. (I think they missed one carrot in the back corner of the bed.) They are tunneling rats, Norway rats, or, least politely, but probably most accurately, sewer rats. I caught 7 of them in traps that summer--a gruesome but needed effort--but I knew that I could only guarantee a carrot harvest by excluding the rats.

Last spring, I had that bed lined with hardware cloth (which isn't cloth, really but tough wire mesh). Now rats can't get in. But I had plans to transplant some other crops into that bed, so I didn't grow carrots there last spring.

Later in the summer, I had our apple tree removed--sad, but necessary, as it had root rot. (I grafted it onto new rootstock. More on this later.) Then I had a second bed, the one the tree had shaded. lined against rats too. I sowed carrot seed there in early August. I hoped carrots would mature before that bed went into shade in mid-November. They did! I know that carrots that go into shade before they are mature do not develop well. If they are nearly mature, the lower part of the roots will stay narrow and will be a paler color than the tops. But the ones I grew were fat and orange right to the tips.

This is what happened the year I planted carrots too late and they went into shade before they had a chance to fill out. 

The carrots I grew this year were shorter varieties, which just happened to be the kind I found locally to buy. (In general, grow shorter varieties if you are growing them in pots or in clay or very rocky soil.) I have sandy loam, so I probably could have grown longer carrots if I had bought them. I have rocks in my soil though, and these will stunt or split carrots, so I dig around under where I plan to plant the seeds and take out rocks I find there as a precaution. As I expected the bed to go into shade at about the time the carrots matured, it is probably just as well they were short--less chance of long, pale tips.

Next February, I will be back to my older practice of sowing seeds in the bed that is in shade then. I am looking forward to a bountiful carrot crop next summer.

P.S. Nurseries have been selling carrot plants recently. These will probably grow, but I doubt that they will form good roots. I haven't tried to grow them yet. I will report when I do.. I think your best bet is to learn to grow them from seed  sown directly in your garden.