Carrots: THE PLANTING.

Your Host, with some pretty nice size carrots freshly pulled from nature's bosom. Photo by Todd Wolfson.

I am VERY enthusiastic about planting carrots here in Austin; I have never had a terrible harvest, no matter how dreadful the soil I have planted them in. I have planted carrots in gravel, in clay, and in reasonable “good” soil, and they have done well in every type of soil (although of course they did BEST in the fairly good soil!) In fact, I have read that it doesn’t DO to fertilize them much, as this makes them grow huge carrot-tops and tiny carrots. They do better in rather poor soil. (I have plenty of that!)

“But why do you bother to plant carrots in the cruddy soil?” you may be asking, gripping your computer with white-knuckled fingers. This is a good time to bring up Crop Rotation. Unfortunately, crop rotation isn’t just for Serious Farmers with Big Farms. It’s like this: when you grow a vegetable, let’s call it Vegetable X,  in the soil, diseases and microbes and viruses and other things I forget the names of (Nematodes! that’s it!) are attracted to Vegetable X and migrate there to feast upon it and prey upon it. By the time you harvest vegetable X,  its Enemies are well-established and hoping to get an easy living by absolutely DECIMATING the next year’s batch.

If you plant the same thing in the same place the next year, it usually does very poorly. VERY. One year, before I learned about CROP ROTATION, I planted Okra in what seemed like an awesome spot for Okra: HOT HOT HOT, full sun, southern exposure. I harvested gigantic bags full of Okra, a bumper crop, I didn’t know what to DO with it all. The next year, I planted them in the OKRA SPOT again, and I GOT NOT A SINGLE POD. NOT ONE!! That is how important it is to rotate your crops.

Huge bucket FUll of Carrots. See how tiny some of them are? THAT"S BECAUSE I DIDN"T THIN THEM ENOUGH!

So, you have to pull the ol’ switcheroo on the nematodes, diseases, etc. There they are, lurking in the soil, waiting to attack….and you plant SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! (It is not advised to plant something only slightly different. For instance, Broccoli and Cabbage are both in the Brassica family, and aren’t different ENOUGH. Most gardening books will tell you what vegetables are in the same family so you can avoid doing a poor rotation.)

So, you have to move everything around every single year. I have a few beds in my garden that are actually sort of GOOD (I think they are where older settlers might have had the henhouse, or the privy) and then I have some rather bad beds, that are very gravelly or stony or heavy clay.)

As you know from YESTERDAY’S post, I am ALWAYS amending my soil with fertilizer and compost, which helps a lot, but I think it all just washes away over time or something. The bad beds are still full of gravel and stones and clay. SOMEDAY (cue music) I will be able to build Bermuda-grass-root resistant masonry beds, filled with perfect stone-free soil and worms, 2 feet deep!. My compost and soil will be trapped and will never wash away again! (This is part of my “Lottery Fantasy”, which is kind of silly because it really wouldn’t cost THAT much! All I would need is a shovel and cement and TIME!)

Making Carrot and Fennel Stock for Vegetarian Soups

Where was I? Oh yes. Carrots do quite well, and also you almost never actually have to cover them in freezes, because the GROUND never freezes here, ever. The carrot tops never seem to freeze either, but even if they did, it wouldn’t affect the actual CARROTS.

To plant your carrots, I recommend loosening your soil and adding compost on top, as deep as seems practical. Then scatter a huge amount of carrot seeds over the top, and water them into the soil. Carrot seeds can take as long as A MONTH (!) to germinate (compared to most seeds only taking a few days) so if they don’t germinate in a normal amount of time, don’t panic. Usually in September they germinate fairly quickly, but if it is chilly out, they take their time.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT plant ANYTHING into Turkey or other bird poop compost! Nothing will germinate in Turkey Compost, I think it is too acidic or something. Use homemade or Revitalizer.

Then, after they germinate, you must THIN them, That means, pull up and kill the innocent little carrot plants so that the remaining carrots are not at all crowded and have room, like one carrot every three inches. Carrots are usually non-compliant and won’t even sprout unless they are in clumps, so you have a bunch a dirt with NO carrots and then fifty carrots all in one inch. Bastards! But you must grit your teeth and pull up nearly all of them so that they are well-thinned.

I had to learn all this THE HARD WAY because, NO, I couldn’t just BELIEVE what the seed packet SAID, I had to experiment for myself with 1) not thinning 2) not using very much seed; what do you know, the old-timers who have actually been growing carrots for generations were right: plant thickly, then thin.

"I remember how it used to rain." She reminisced, next to a huge juicy hollyhock, the kind that only grows when it actually rains. Photo by Todd Wolfson

Interesting Carrot Fact: Carrots used to be considered an EXOTIC vegetable that no one knew about. The vegetable that was MUCH more POPULAR is the one that looks like a WHITE carrot, the PARSNIP. Parsnips can be left in the field during a hard freeze and they don’t freeze and get ruined, and the cold makes them taste sweet (Cold makes all vegetables taste sweet, including carrots, which is why the best tasting vegetables come from cold places like New York State, in the summer I mean.) So naturally everyone liked parsnips better, because they were less work and sweeter. BUT WHERE ARE YOU NOW, PARSNIPS? NO ONE EATS YOU ANYMORE!

(Hey, maybe I should plant some! I would eat them! Daikon radishes grow really really well here, and they LOOK like parsnips.)

The other grand thing about CARROTS, for the home gardener, is that they are one of those awesome vegetables that, anytime from when they are tiny to when they are huge, you can just go pick one when you need one. It’s not like they all come ripe at once and demand use immediately, no matter HOW inconvenient this is for YOU. Instead, like green peppers and onions, you can go get one when you need one and just leave the rest to keep growing larger.

Gratuitous picture of cats playing with catnip