The Carrot Challenge - Grow carrots with me in 2016!!

[Penellype]

My Eskimo, a couple of which have bolted, are looking a bit worse for wear and are therefore now at the top of the list for harvest. For some reason the foliage has started to go yellow, which has not happened to the other varieties. The carrots are fine, if a little smaller than I had hoped for.

[veggiechicken]

V.C, did you harvest any of yours yet? Do you have any pics and which one did best for you?

Sorry to admit that I only sowed a few buckets and all the first seedlings were slugged
I've just pulled some of the only bucket still around and its not very impressive. I've obviously sown them too thickly/not thinned them
The good news is - they weren't attacked by carrot fly

[Penellype]

They don't look too bad VC - some of mine are smallish too, but they are still very edible.

[veggiechicken]

I think the camera has been kind to them! They were edible but as mini-carrots, the sort that they'd charge an arm and a leg for in an upmarket restaurant

[muddled]

My most successful (so far) were the 'Touchon' variety from realseeds via a seedswap.
Some were index finger sized, some larger....all sweet and crunchy and extremely 'carroty'.

Least successful has been the parmex type 'Rondo'
They started with great promise, quick to germinate and lots of lush green leaves.
Sadly the carrots themselves are small and woody and a bit tasteless.

[Whatalottie]

Mice?

I sowed my last lot and put them in the polytunnel. They were cropped! The tops of the seedlings were removed almost all along the row.

I put in mice bait (which I don;t like to do, but it's inside the poly), the bait disappeared and the nibbling stopped. I've never heard of mice nibbling the tops of seedlings.

I've sown more*thickly!), but its so late I might not get any carrots.

[Penellype]

Finished my first pot of Marion yesterday - nice carrots but not as big as last year. Now starting on the first pot of Nantes Frubund - again not as big as last year. I think the weather has not been good for carrots this year - very wet then very dry with the occasional deluge just to confuse things. I've been shuffling drip trays in and out of the carrot cage for most of the year, as carrots hate to be dry but also don't much like sitting in a puddle... There's also been a bit of slug damage to some of the roots, which I've not had before.

Just another 3 pots, 2 buckets and the quadgrow planter of Flyaway to eat after the Nantes

[jackarmy]

So i tried last year and on the whole failed.
Carrots grew but were very short and not reached their potential, is watering from the bottom preffered ?.
Gonna try again this year so all advice welcome, will read through here againin the meantime .

[Penellype]

Carrots are certainly tricky to get right - on the whole I was rather disappointed with the size of most of mine last year. The 2 crucial factors seem to be how thickly they are sown and the watering.

Carrot seed is very small and it is easy to sow it far too thickly. Of the 7 pots of carrots that I sowed last year I managed to sow 3 of them too thickly with small carrots as a result. It doesn't help that you are not sure how much germination you are going to get, and carrots germinate really slowly, so it is 1-2 months before you can see what you have got. Thinning is generally a bad idea - it attracts pests and disturbs the roots of neighbouring seedlings, which can then dry out, twist or fork. I never thin my carrots, and I try to avoid weeding them if possible until they are well established.

Carrots hate drying out. I think this could have been part of my problem last year when a couple of the pots had a few that bolted. The problem was that the spring was so wet that I didn't dare put drip trays under the pots because if they stand in water all the time the carrots will drown. Any survivors develop an unpleasant rusty brown colour and taste of very little. The weather then went from wet to dry very very quickly and I was too slow off the mark with the drip trays. I did do an experiment with Flyaway (mainly to test its resistance to carrot fly, which was ok at first but by 6 months the bigger carrots were damaged), planted in a Quadgrow vegetable planter with a self watering tray. This was one of the pots that I sowed too thickly unfortunately, and I didn't sow them until June, so it was hard to judge how well the planter actually performed.

Feeding them is supposed to make them fork. I never feed carrots, although I have grown them in new MPC which has feed in it. They were nice big carrots and didn't fork, so maybe a small amount of feed might help with size, but be aware of the risk. Growing carrots in soil that had been mulched with horse muck the previous spring at my friend's produced huge but very forked carrots. Could have been due to stones in the soil, I don't know. I sieve my carrot compost.

So, the essentials are to sow much more thinly than you think you need to, keep them watered well especially when small but don't drown them, and cover them with nets to avoid carrot fly.

[vixylix]

my carrots grew brilliantly in 2016! Of course I was aiming for tiny baby carrots like those expensive ones in the shops

I was definitely guilty of underwatering and over sowing!

Penellype / anyone else - do you think that snipping them off (i.e. not disturbing any of the roots at all) could work to thin them out with no disruption?

[Penellype]

I'd be inclined not to snip them off as you might find that this encouraged mould or disease. You could also find that they regrew if you didn't cut them off far enough down. Remember also that damaging the foliage attracts carrot fly so you would have to have them well netted at this point if you tried it.

[Penellype]

carrots germinate really slowly, so it is 1-2 months before you can see what you have got.

Just in case anyone thinks I am a carrot expert, I sowed some seed in a pot in my spare bedroom on 2nd January. This morning I went in there to get something and was astonished to find they had well and truly germinated in just 8 days. I had to make hurried alterations to my grow light setup as the pot was too tall for the grow light garden!

Growing things is always full of surprises.

[Scoot]

I grow my carrots in 40 ltrs pots using last years tomato compost (Sieved). I was also guilty of sowing too thickly last year. so this coming year I am going to take the time to sow one seed every 3 or 4cm's. Yes it will take a little bit of extra time and it certainly will be quite fiddly, but i reckon it'll be worth a try as I'm sick of getting tiny carrots that are in a lot of cases, unusable.

[Penellype]

This is what some of my Nantes Frubund sown last spring look like now:



I'm not sure whether this pot was sown in mid March or early April. There is a little damage but nothing that won't peel off. Not at all woody yet - this variety really does stand well over winter.

[Deano's "Diggin It"]

"Show Off's".