big carrot greens, no carrots

[stubedo]

Hi, I bought some raised beds for my garden , I just experimented with a variety of seeds to see how they did to start with , I grew some carrots and the green tops were nice and long over a foot high, I decided to dig them up tonight, after 2.5 months, and there was well, no carrots , 1 tiny 1.5 cm one, and that was all, why would they grow so badly? I`m growing spinach in the same raised bed and its fine, the raised bed is a somewhat shaded area, where did i go wrong anyone? The soil i`m using is third garden soil, third store bought compost, third vermiculite.....

Stuart

[ameno]

Have you been feeding them, or did you feed them before you sowed? What you describe is usually caused by too much nitrogen, which is why you generally shouldn't feed carrots.
Otherwise, it could be overcrowding. What sort of spacing do you have them at?

Also, in future you should test if carrots are big enough to pull by just brushing away the soil near the base of the plant to reveal the shoulder of the root, then seeing if it's wide enough to be worth pulling. That way, if it's too small you can just leave it to grow longer.

[Jungle Jane]

How deep are your raised beds & what’s the base,did you put cardboard down or was it built straight on a lawn? Carrots do need a bit of depth,if the soils compacted under the base they could struggle. Have you lifted them a bit too soon tho,maybe they could do with longer?

[Penellype]

Not enough time and possibly too much feed. Carrots are biennial plants. Their life cycle involves growing leaves in spring and summer, then storing the nutrients made by those leaves in a large tap root over winter (the carrot) to provide energy for the plant to flower the following spring. You want to harvest the carrots in late summer, autumn or even winter (depending a bit on the variety), when they have had a chance to make bigger roots.