Am I doing anything wrong? It seems like it takes 14 to 21 days after sowing to see a decent number of carrots emerging.
The damn weeds grow faster than the carrots do, but it’s hard to weed around them until the plants are big enough that you don’t accidentally yank them out!
That’s typical for carrots in cold weather. A lot (all?) of the umbelliferae have seeds that really take a long time to germinate. The plus is that they’ll tolerate cold soil while they’re waiting, unlike beans, for example, which happily rot if you try plant them much below 60 F.
You can nudge them along by scarifying them, though- rub gently between a couple of pieces of medium sandpaper. At least, that’s what they say. I haven’t tried it because decent carrots are one of those things I can buy so easily, and I save my energies now for more funner things. (Plus I have a low patience for slow germinators!)
I gave up on growing carrots in the ground - there is a competition going between weeds, squirrels, root knot nematodes and neighborhood cats “who kills more carrots”. I switched to self-watering containers made from 55 gallon drums and also concrete blocks that make my terraces. They still germinate slow, but there are almost no weed competition, and also I cover the containers and blocks with plywood and boards, that keeps soil mix moist, you just need to look under often and remove as soon as you see first babies emerging. .
Carrots, like many veggies, are a fire-and-adjust growing situation. I grow in large landscape pots that I’ve mulched with compost during the winter. Very little weeds that way and they are protected from wandering mammals (cats and dogs) and digging mammals (voles and moles). Gardening is VERY frustrating if you do not protect whatever you are growing.
The biggest challenge for me is keeping the surface soil moist after planting for about a month, AND protecting them from rain washouts. I do this with an old sheet suspended above but close to the dirt level. Direct the rain runoff with the sheet too. So I plant, protect, and forget about them for a month…then peek and uncover if all is well.
I can post pictures if you like b/c I just planted parsnips the same way.
I’m trying the broadcast, lightly rake, water, and cover with cardboard thing. I have sprouts finally, but this gale force wind has made keeping the cardboard down a challenge. Even with pins on the edges and with laying steel T-posts on top of the cardboard the wind still got under one and put the steel post on my row of potatoes and the cardboard out in the field.
I had great carrots this yr. They germinated in about 10 days but that was last August as I recall. I harvested about January and have been eating them ever since. Nice and crisp, not hard, and pretty sweet.
I plant radishes in a row with about six inches of space between rows. After the radishes germinate and grow a little I plant carrots between the rows of radishes. The radishes make a boundary line that helps me keep track of what is a carrot and what is a weed. I then keep a piece of floating row cover over the radishes and carrots that is held off the soil and above the carrots (much like Anne said) by the leaves of the radishes. By the time the radishes are ready to harvest, the carrots could use some extra room. The row cover keeps the rain from washing away seed and provides some shade so the soil doesn’t dry out.
That is some serious wind there, LOL.
Because of our abundant moisture, slugs can be a big problem when planting in the warmer months, like August. When I went to check on them once I thought they hadn’t germinated but upon close inspection the tiny stems were there - the slugs just prefer the leaves. So note to self, use slug bait prior to planting carrots in warm weather. BTW using cardboard in my climate provides slugs shady condos.
My soil is dark and the sun really heats it up causing it to lose that surface moisture needed for the carrots so using something a little more opaque than row cover is what I needed to do.
Yes it is! For the past couple days we’ve had wind speeds shown as pretty much steady throughout the day at between 24-27 MPH with gusts to 45. It’s been dry and a lot of surrounding counties have burning bans, now this morning we’ve had a shower and it’s supposed to rain for for three days…
I’d planted out tomatoes on Saturday and the wind picked up steadily all day out of the South, it was gusting so bad that I got to worrying about the li’l guys some, so I went back out and drove some shake shingles on the South of each plant to block most of the wind.
The coming rain will make the garden off limits, but I’d really like to try your sheet idea on the carrots.
I used the board method for a few rows of carrots and beets and it worked great. The boards were actually some fairly warped 4x4s I had lying around, so they weren’t in contact along the whole rows, but overall it seemed to provide the shade needed to keep it from overheating or drying out.
The very cold spring we’ve had might have slowed down germination with the boards, since the soil wasn’t warmed by the sun at all and the air temps were in the 30s and 40s for many nights in a row. I can’t remember exactly how long it took, but I think it was at least 2 weeks until I saw the first sprouts (beets), so I rolled the 4x4s back and they all started coming up. I decided to leave the boards while the rest were still sprouting, since they provided a few extra hours of shade to the rows.
A few gaps, but a lot better germination than I’ve had and now I’m going to have to get in there and snip some out to thin them.
To reduce the weed issue, I dig out a little trench, fill it with fresh potting soil and plant into that. The weeds show up eventually, but it reduces the issue of all the weed seed I have in my native soil and most importantly means fewer weeds coming up right in among the tiny carrots and out competing them.
Very nice harvest Derek!
Beautiful, Derek. What variety is that? And do you store your bin inside in zone 3?
heated garage kept just above freezing. they are nantes variety.
How magnificent!
