Carrot Experiment

A couple of months ago, I posted in the "What I Did Today" thread about a little experiment that I was doing with my carrots. I planted them in upturned 2 litre plastic milk bottles with the bottoms cut off.



There was a couple of reasons for this. One is that I hoped that the lips around the edge might dissuade any varmints like Carrot Flies from getting at the plants. The main reason though is that my soil is really fine and doesn't hold water at all well and germination is one of my biggest problems, so I hoped that keeping them in a confined area would make it easier to keep moisture with the plants and give them a better chance at starting off. In the row of the bottles there, I also continued to sow the row and the one to the right with carrot seeds to see if it really did make a difference. As you can see from this next pic, it has.



As you can see, there's not a single other carrot in the ordinary soil in the same row as the upturned bottles as far as the picture shows, and they are only spasmodic in the other row too, but the plants in the bottles are thriving. While weeding today, I accidentally pulled a young carrot out of the ground and you can see it in that pic and at how healthy it looks, so I'm hoping that the rest of the plants are the same beneath the ground.

I also planted up some more carrots in bigger plasting bottles a few weeks later and these seem to be doing great as well.