Growing Carrots

Growing carrots is a fun way to introduce vegetables to kids, and to provide tasty garnishes for your salads. Carrots are a highly nutritious vegetable. Gnomes love ‘em. (I can hardly keep my carrots in the ground long enough before some other gnome wants to gobble them up!)

They do require a little bit of extra care, and good soil preparation before planting for best results. Here’s how to grow carrots.

Soil Preparation

Few things are as important, in terms of growing edible and nice-looking carrots, than soil preparation. Before planting, double-dig the soil in your beds. That means, dig up, turn over and chop up the soil to a depth of at least eight to twelve inches. If your soil is very heavy, you will want to add sand and some compost to the soil as you double-dig. This is excellent exercise!

If you want nice, long, evenly shaped carrot roots, the soil needs to be loose, well drained and not overly compost-heavy. Carrots are not heavy feeders. Excess nitrogen will result in large tops and small roots, as well as hairy roots. Not tasty.

Carrot Varieties

Nantes types of carrots are cylindrical in shape, with blunt tips. Imperator varieties are long and tapered in shape. The nantes varieties are typically thought to be the sweetest and tastiest, and are less fibrous. Bolero and Ingot are easily available nantes-types for growing in your garden. If you have heavy, clay-type soil, you might want to try Thumbelina, which is a shorter, rounder carrot.

Here Are Some Great Seed Sources:

Gurney's Seed and Nursery

Henry Fields Seed and Nursery

Carrots Love Tomatoes!

One of the best ways to keep pests from attacking any of your garden plants is to plant compatible plants together. There is a great book called Carrots Love Tomatoes, which gives lots of information about one of the best techniques for gardeners: companion planting. (FYI-Gnomes are great companions for all garden plants!)

Growing carrots do better when planted near beans, tomatoes, peppers and leeks. This relationship is symbiotic: the plants repel pests for each other and improve the end flavor of the harvest. Just don’t plant your carrots around dill or celery. They don’t get along very well.

How To Grow Carrots

Carrots are a mostly cool weather crop. You can sow them directly into the garden about a month before the last spring frost date, or three months before the first fall frost date.

The secret of how to grow carrots is in getting them to germinate well. It can take up to three weeks for carrots to germinate. During that time, it is possible for a tough soil crust to build up, making it difficult, if not impossible, for carrots to break through.

The seed is small and must be planted close to the soil surface (about ¼ inch deep) and must remain moist without crusting until the seed germinates and breaks through. Here are some tips that we gnomes use.

Plant radishes with your growing carrots. The radishes germinate quickly and keep the soil nice and loose for the carrot seeds.

Place a board on top of the seed row until the seeds germinate. Peek every couple of days, and remove it as soon as the seed germinates.

Make sure the organic matter in the top couple of inches in the seed bed is high enough that the soil won’t easily crust.

Gently mist the soil until germination, but don’t let it get really wet (it will crust if you do).

After carrots have sprouted, you will want to thin them so that there is at least 3-6 inches between each carrot. That way, you’ll be able to harvest fat, juicy carrots and not long, stringy carrots.

These tips should help you while you are growing carrots. Don’t forget to leave some for the gnomes.

Happy gardening,

Geefrank

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