It was encouraging to see a post by Penny Woodward in Organic Gardening Magazine (Australian) where she writes that she used to think she couldn’t grow carrots, but then found the tricks (and made the beds) that give her successful crops. A lot of sources just say ‘Carrot growing is easy, go grow them!’ in a very encouraging way, but actually I have found them tricky too.
Fortunately for the home gardener, most of the tricky or slow vegetables like carrots, celery and onions tend to be the ones that are cheap, always available, and pretty generic (I never choose my carrot variety at the market) so we can concentrate on growing the rewarding ones like tomatoes and lettuce. I tend to wonder why I persist with carrots. It’s partly the challenge, but also I prefer the stronger flavour of home grown.
Seedsaving, though, makes a difference. Seed companies are usually pretty generous with the number of carrot seeds in a packet, but still each sowing feels like using up the resource, especially when a summer sowing yields only a couple of survivors.
One of my summer sown carrots went to seed, but the loss of one carrot for pulling is more than offset by the advantages. First of all the flowering carrot is pretty in the garden and attracts beneficial insects, but then one carrot plant produces a huge amount of seed (that big storage root is there to nourish the seed).
Just a couple of the seed heads gave me enough seed to have as many goes at sowing as I like, so if I am organised with bed preparation I could sow a strip every few weeks. By the way, I threw the rest of the seed heads to the chickens (much appreciated) because they became heavily infested with aphids which I didn’t want to spread.
A theoretical advantage of saving this seed is that the progeny might be better suited to local conditions than the original seed packet (as this plant did well while the ones around it didn’t).
I did try to pull one of the neighbouring carrots to thin it from its neighbour, but it turned out the two were intertwined. It seems outrageous that one carrot would reach a few centimetres and completely encircle another, but that’s always the danger and it really does affect their cooking utility, although the flavour was great.
I’m determined to get the cultivation right, as Penny did, and hopefully start taking advantage of some of the different colours and shapes, for a bit of interest in the kitchen.