For a Healthy Carrot Crop, Make Some Amendments

Growing Your Own Carrots: A Garden Delicacy

Commercial carrots need to ship well and are grown to be fibrous. However, home-grown carrots are intensely sweet and crunchy, making them the perfect garden delicacy. You can often pull them out of the garden, brush them off, and eat them right away.

Not only are fresh carrots tasty, but they’re also rich in beta carotene, the naturally occurring form of Vitamin A.

Carrot Varieties: More Than Just Orange

Although you probably picture the traditional long orange carrot, the vegetable comes in a wide range of colors, shapes, and sizes, says Wendy Krupnick, horticultural advisor for Shepherd’s Garden Seeds in Felton, Calif. Their seeds can also be found in some nurseries.

“There are white carrots, purple carrots, round and short carrots,” she says.

Growing carrots also means you can enjoy gourmet “baby” carrots, which are often sold at a high price in specialty markets.

Carrot plants aren’t found in nurseries because it’s a root crop that must be planted by seed.

Planting Carrots: Best Practices

March is an ideal month to plant carrots, which germinate best in cool weather. Keep the following tips in mind to ensure a successful harvest:

  • For a good carrot crop, the soil must be loose, rich, and fast draining. Carrots are roots and cannot push their way through hard, compacted earth. Grow them in poor soil, and they’ll be stunted, gnarled, and tasteless.
  • Loosen hard clay soil and prepare it for planting by generously amending it with homemade or bagged compost. Other good amendments include aged grass clippings, aged manure, coffee grounds, and high-quality sandy loam, which can be purchased through a contractor or landscape company.
  • Carrots grow especially well in raised beds and containers because the soil is easier to control. In containers, use a good potting mix and add compost for extra richness. Stick to dwarf carrots under five inches long, such as Short and Sweet, Tiny Sweet, Red Core Chantenay, Little Finger, and the golf-ball-size Thumbelina.
  • When working ground soil, loosen it to at least 18 inches.
  • Add a fertilizer high in phosphorus when planting, such as bone meal, to promote strong root growth.
  • Choose a carrot variety suited for heavy clay soil. These varieties tend to be short, blunt, and/or round. Avoid long, thin carrots.
  • Pick a location that gets sun most of the day. Ensure that the area drains well, as waterlogged carrots will rot.
  • Carrot seeds are tiny, brown, and hard to see. To ensure even distribution, mix the seeds with sand. Some seed catalogs sell seed tape, which is biodegradable tissue paper with seeds attached. You can also buy a carrot seed dispenser.
  • Plant carrot seeds about one-eighth inch deep and keep them moist but not soaked. If the seeds dry out, they will quickly die.
  • To prevent carrot seeds from washing away when watered, cover them with burlap or newspaper and water until they germinate.
  • Be patient, as carrot seeds can take several weeks to germinate.
  • Thinning is often necessary. Hand-pull the carrots when they reach 1 to 2 inches high, aiming for a final spacing of about 2 inches apart.
  • Carrots need frequent fertilizing. Use diluted applications of an all-purpose fertilizer containing phosphorus.
  • Keep carrot plants evenly moist. Alternating wet and dry conditions will cause carrots to split.

Seed Catalogs: Where to Find Carrot Seeds

Here’s a sampling of mail-order companies that carry a variety of carrot seeds. All offer free catalogs:

  • Gurney’s Seed & Nursery Co., 110 Capitol St., Yankton, SD 57078, (605) 665-1930.
  • Nichols Garden Nursery, 1190 N. Pacific Highway, Albany, OR 97321, (503) 928-9280.
  • Park Seed Co., Cokesbury Road, Greenwood, SC 29647, (800) 845-3369.
  • Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, Order Department, 30 Irene St., Torrington, CT 06790, (408) 335-6910.
  • Stokes Seeds, P.O. Box 548, Buffalo, NY 14240-0548, (716) 695-6980.

Julie Bawden-Davis

Julie Bawden-Davis is a bestselling journalist, novelist, blogger, and YouTuber. A prolific author, Julie writes in several genres. She enjoys creating page-turning suspense served up with a dose of romance, garden books that turn any brown thumb green, and spiritual books meant to enlighten and inspire. Widely published, Julie has written 45 books and more than 4,000 articles for a wide variety of national and international publications. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys sunny, blue skies most days and year-round gardening. Julie gains inspiration from being surrounded by plants when she writes.