Grow Your Own Magazine

Grow Your Own is looking for your advice on growing carrots. What are your top tips for growing carrots and just how do you get a bumper crop of lovely straight carrots? They also want to know which your favourite varieties are and why?

The best will be published in the March issue of Grow Your Own. So come on!! Once again this will be a big plug for the Grapevine plus you might have your advice published.

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Well...........

Carrots should generally be grown in light sandy soil which is almost stoneless. Try some of the nice varieties like Early nantes or Autumn king as these are the greatest varieties in my opinion.

I also grow a lot of carrots in a large tub of quality compost (in the greenhouse for an early crop) as this is the best way to beat the dreaded carrot fly

Hope that helps a little

This is one crop I have never had much success with so I am looking forward to reading other peoples views on combatting the dreaded carrot fly?

Enviromesh seems to be the 'way to go' but is so expensive! Have tried all the other so called deterrants (including fleece) though and none of them work for me!

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My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

Not everybody has that perfect sandy soil for growing carrots and I am one of them. I garden on clay, much improved, but still clay. No chance for carrots I thought, until a Grape on the Vine suggested Parmex in containers. This I did planting the seeds straight into compost in a crate. The results were good and I was pleased, but Parmex are small round carrots so the crop is limited. Another grape suggested that Early Nantes could be grown in containers providing they were at least 8" deep. I went for that one. I planted the seeds straight into the compost but taking the time to space 1" apart each way. A bit of a nit picking job - but wow! Perfect, full bodied , straight carrots and a crop just about bursting the containers. Little watering and no feeding required. I wouldn't do it any other way. And a big thank you to the Grape who introduced me to the method.

I grow "Flak" a long carrot up to a metre in length with a 4" top. I sow the seeds in June in 2m drain pipes filled with John Innes no 1 and my secret compost. (Grass and Sawdust well composted in a large compost tumbler).

I also grow them in the ground and during harvest in November I dig a trench down beside the row and take them out with a crowbar. They are very tasty and last me for months stored in the usual way in sand.
Benacre.
Lowestoft

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[quote=Snadger;52704]This is one crop I have never had much success with so I am looking forward to reading other peoples views on combatting the dreaded carrot fly?


Sow in June or July after the Fly has matured. water the rows first before sowing the seed and cover with potting compost, cover soil in the normal way and every ten days water them with a liquid feed.

If you must have a spring crop grow Tagetes along the side of the rows.This confuses the fly so they cannot oviposite covering the rows between the carrots with woodchips will also stop them smelling the sap of the Carrot.

Or....... Grow Daucus carota "Wild Carrot" and they will target this as it is their natural food plant

Benacre

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http://lowestoftnaturalist-benacre.blogspot.com/

Paris Market is another round rooted job that you can sow in a windobox, nice green ferny foiliage looks V. Nice

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ntg

Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark.
A large group of professionals built the Titanic

http://grief-encounters.blogspot.com/

I grew carrots and onions in alternate rows last year in raised beds and had no troubles with carrot fly at all. The ground here is what you might call clay but is really just cultivated peat and very wet this far north which is why we went for the raised beds. One of the locals told me that the extra hight of the raised beds might have helped keep off the carrot fly as they like to fly low to the ground. Monster carrots here in Lewis, but when I grew them in Edinburgh the previous year they were tiddilers so they must like the extra water.

I like chanterey style carrots as like me they look good and have a wondefull taste (disregard the last bit). Chanterey style carrotys are a fabulous shape and flavour for those who want to impress when serving up food.

They are grown in raised beds and are sown 3/4 seeds to a station with the stations being 2" apart with 6" between rows. No thinning is required and you harvest the first as finger carrots, till eventually you are left with one carrot at each station to mature as your store crop. A 4 x 4 bed will give you a couple of hundred carrots for store so is thus very compact and bijou for those with little space.

The bed is covered in enviromesh to prevent carrot root fly and two beds are sown 6 weeks a apart which gives a fabulous stream of carrots all summer.

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Kindest regards, David.

http://pigletsplots.blogspot.com/
updated - Sunday 19th at 2100hrs

what do you mean by station what are they made of, I am going to try and a raised bed, and use toilet rolls to avoid thining could put more than one seed in .

marion

I tried carrots last year and failed dismally! The people we bought the house from left us some lovely big carrots in the ground (2005), so it's not the ground that's the problem - must just be me! I sowed a whole row and had about 6 seedlings come through, which gradually disappeared over the course of a week. Very disappointing, so I can't help with this one at all!

two things to remember with carrots ,they dont like hot ground or freshly manured ground,

Station is just a gardening term for position!

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My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

I have had alot of success with carrots over the last two years (in fact I would go as far as saying it is my most successful vegetable), but I only grow Early Nante and Autumn King.

I sow Early Nante in the polytunnel in early April - watering a small trench, sowing the seed quite densely and then covering lightly with compost. Then I cover the row with fleece until the seeds germinate. In May I sow Early Nante outside but always alongside garlic in order to deter carrot fly (and yes we do get it here!). And so far have not had a problem. I do two successional sowings, three weeks apart. Then in July I sow Autumn King outside and another sowing in the Polytunnel at the end of August. I sow quite densely and spend a bit of time thinning out, but the thinnings are always useful for salads or soup. They are always very sweet.

This year we have been eating carrots from late May onwards. The July sowing has been left in the ground, trenched up and I have been digging up a few at a time over the Christmas and New Year holiday. The last sowing in the polytunnel have sprouted, but are just biding their time to put on a spurt (I hope!) in March/April.

Surprised to dig some wonderfull carrots at the lottie today without a hint of root fly damage or any other damage for that matter.!

These were an American variety called 'Danvers' and were sown in the area vacated by my onions (which are still in storage) I used some fleece but it was only on the plants until they burst through the top of it.

Looking forward to tasting these with my Sunday dinner tomorrow but I know they will be nice because I nibbled a few raw and they had a lovely fresh taste!

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My Majesty made for him a garden anew in order
to present to him vegetables and all beautiful flowers.- Offerings of Thutmose III to Amon-Ra (1500 BCE)

Forgot to say, carrots I grew last year were Autunm King 2, Market Gardener, Red Giant and Amsterdam Forcing 3-Sprint, all of which grew really well. Just sowed them straight in the ground and I was bad and manured the ground earlier in the year, but then I quite like pulling up the odd weird shaped, multi pronged carrot. Next/this year I'm going to try Ingot and Purple Dragon aswell, see how they grow. I agree with Jennie that thinnings are yummy in salads, n I like them in stirfrys or tossed in butter with sweetpeas too.

I put all my used growbag compost in the ground where the carrots are to be grown and sift out any large stones. I also plant them in a square with chives all around the edge, havn't seen a carrot fly yet.

had a lot of probs with carrots early this year. I think this was down to variety as the late august/early september sown Autumn King have done brilliantly are standing well in the ground and taste fab.

My dad suggested taking a spade down a line waggling it back and forth to form a "v" shaped trench, fill it with a mix of compost and sand and sow into that. Worked a treat on the late carrots, hardly any fanging and our ground is quite stony. Works well for parsnips too.

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Bright Blessings
Earthbabe
If at first you don't succeed, open a bottle of wine.

Weird.... seem to have lost the reply I posted... Never mind. Here goes again!
WAFFLER: Little black keel slugs living in the soil will be the problem you experienced with disappearing carrot seedlings. I lost a square metre of Early Nantes in exactly the same way last summer......

I love to grow Amsterdam Sweetheart, finger sized carrots because they are just SO sweet-tasting, and look stunning on the plate, or used for dunking into a yummy summer dip....

Early Nantes but do not manure the soil when you plant them. If you do you will get more than one root.

If you have heavy soil dig a trench and add a mixture of sand and compost and plant into that. Not forgetting to mulch over the tops of any carrots that grow above the soil level to prevent discoloration.

Or as I intend to do this year fill a dust bin with spent potting compost and plant in to that. It should help with Carrot Root fly. who are not surposed to be able to fly more than 30 inches of the ground.

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A couple of years ago I grew a beautiful crop of 'Early Nantes' carrots in my raised 'square foot' bed in 3 1ft squares which I hid amongst the ones containing shallots & onions to disguise the scent & hopefully put off the carrot fly. I sowed the seeds thinly & well spaced apart, directly into the bed which I had topped up with homemade & bought in compost. I had no trouble with carrot fly as I didn't have to thin them out very much either (I think if you thin out in the evening & throw the thinnings away it's supposed to help also). This year I tried to grow some in a pot & was a complete failure! As soon as the seedlings came up they disappeared, I think slugs or snails must have eaten them so the carrot fly didn't get a chance!

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Into every life a little rain must fall.

Like Snadger, I've never had much success with carrots, discovering Parmex and Paris Market this year was a godsend. This year, following Nick