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  • From: EarthNSky <erthnsky AT bellsouth.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Carrots
  • Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:52:33 -0500

As always, great gardening post, James.

Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:

Now I plant them two ways: In beds made of small ridges 4" or so apart. I can identify the location of the carrots by the ridges and weed the rest clean, also I can water in the space between ridges without washing out the tiny seeds. When the carrots have established themselves, I fill in the troughs between ridges with compost to level the bed once more.

That is kind of what I have been doing with the short, parallel rows.


A second method is this: and it comes from the observations of my failed attempts to transplant them. Hairy carrots do not result so much from too much fertility as it does from too much fertility close to the surface. The no-till-teetotalers depend on earthworms to drag organic material own rather than mix it in mechanically. This tends to have the upper layers more fertile than the lower layers.
The carrot's game plan is to decide how big a tap root it will use to store food, then send down the root to a certain depth and branch the roothairs from there. If it finds the upper layers very fertile but the lower ones not, it has no recourse but to send out root hairs from the swollen root.

So here is my second way: I get a really fertile bed prepared usually by applying a lot of chicken manure and or rabbit manure (plus wood ashes which also contain potassium and calcium). Then I cover that with some inert organic material or else very low fertility material such as neutralized peat, half rotten sawdust, light compost with a lot of creek sand. This inert-ish material goes on 4" thick or better. Carrot seeds are broadcast on top. Weeds are mimimum but kept religiouisly pulled.

The carrot looks at the medium in which it has sprouted and immediately sends down the tiny taproot until it finds the very fertile ground beneath. It doesn't bother to branch the taproot before that because it knows it would do it little good.

That makes a lot of sense, and since I generally layer the top of that bed with fine compost to make a seeding area for small seeds like carrots, that is exactly what is happening. My top layer is too rich.
Hairy Carrot Mystery Solved.



The very best garden carrot I've found is Touchon (Nichols carries it, I think). It is a bit short, but ideally suited for the type of cultivation I'm doing. The last few years I've grown those white, red, yellow, and purple carrots offered by, among others, Baker Creek. They did really well with the white ones being the most tricky to get a good roots.

Plant carrots all the time. OK, with the freezy-frosty on us the next couple of weeks, maybe not today exactly. But just as soon as this worst breath of winter passes, plant some carrots. Cover the planting with an inch of sawdust or peat or some such and if a ground heave threatens, cover it with a tarp of straw or some such. Then in three weeks or so, plant some more, then more and more all the way to early November.

When you pull your first carrots, cut off the tops leaving about 1/2" of carrot and plant them back in the garden. Within a very short time you will have another crop of carrots. Sometimes I prepare a bed in the garden and take a basket and knife and as I harvest the carrots I want for the next couple of days, I simply turn to the other bed and plant the tops back (tops, leaves, and all). The same top will often produce carrots for three years.


Get out!
No way!
Are you kidding me?
<sigh>

1/11/2009 5:57 PM


--
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race"

~ Calvin Coolidge




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