Re: Carrot Week 2013

CapeCoddess 8/25/2013, 2:44 pm

llama momma wrote:Thanks a bunch everyone.
Turan I agree that other carrots grow better.
From my limited observation tweaking genetics for other colors besides orange weakens the vigorous growth factor.

Agreed. I planted the Rainbow a few times after carrot week and just yesterday, while pulling other types of carrots, I pulled a red one. It looked just like a radish, it was so small and round. This is the only one I got out of a pack of seeds. I won't grow them again. But you folks did a great job!

CC

bnoles 8/25/2013, 7:08 pm

I finally worked my way over to the carrot top hat planted on April 15, 2013 and harvested these little critters. I was pretty well disappointed in the size of most of them, but I guess I may have had my expectations set too high for my part of the country and timing the of planting.

I will roast the larger ones with some other veggies tomorrow for dinner and see if my chickens have any interest in the rest.

I think that in the future, I will stay with the regular orange carrots and plant in the cooler parts of our season. I was a fun experiment though.

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Goosegirl 8/25/2013, 10:25 pm

I have to say that my Carrot Week carrots did better than the previous 2 years of Carrot Weeks - except for the rambunctious kitten (currently licking my hand) that bounded through the box and dug up most of the 2 squares. The few survivors of the Cosmic Purples did nicely, but nowhere near as well as the ones I planted in the actual boxes outdoors at the proper time for my area. Instead of the 4" ones from the Carrot Week box, my Cosmic Purple crop out of the bed varied from 4" to some 8"+ monsters with 2-3" diameter shoulders. All monsters just as tasty as the little snackers.

LOVE ME SOME COSMIC PURPLES!!!

GG

No_Such_Reality 9/12/2013, 1:29 pm

Sorry if this has been covered, but there's 22 pages of prior posts. Shocked

How do you control the carrot planting? I'm curious on density, thinning, etc. Do you diligently plant 16 per square? Make 16 holes, plant a few and thin or do you plant much more and thin to roughly 16 evenly space around the square or do you plant more and keep more than 16 per square.

Anybody using a seeder or just plunking a pinch in each hole?

Can I plant 36? does it get too dense and promote diseases when all the tops get bushy? Or do 36 work, if you harvest every other one when they're half grown?

Anybody using the french scatter method of just intermixing radishes, carrots, scallions etc and picking as you go?

Wow, that's a lot of peppered questions. Basically, we use a lot of carrots and frankly, organic carrots are really pretty cheap at the store anyway, like $1.99/pound, often less. At 16 per square, I'll burn up a couple months of square time to probably harvest, about a pound. So I'm doing it for the joy of growing my own, experimenting with non-store varieties (although we like the standard orange store carrots) and getting the know what's in it, fresh from the garden flavor.

CapeCoddess 9/12/2013, 3:46 pm

I hear ya about the grocery store carrots, NSR. Cheap, perfect & delicious. I go through at least a lb a week and just don't have the space in the SFG to keep up with that. BUT I keep trying and have done all of the ways of planting that you mentioned above.

Of the last 2 batches I planted one was broadcast and one was 32/sq. I'll leave the 32/sq but I thinned the broadcast ones the other day so that no one was touching and to give them 1/2 to 1 inch of space each. I'll pull baby & teenage carrots from that batch as time goes by and hopefully get some big ones in the end.

For fall I recently broadcast seeds under and around the tomato plants within those squares & will thin to 1 in. once they are about an inch high. I love pulling up carrots in the middle of winter, but learned the hard way that I'll need to at least cover them with leaves so the soil doesn't freeze rock solid.

CC

gingeandhales 10/3/2013, 6:38 pm

This is my first time planting carrots and I got a tiny little harvest which isn't so bad considering I neglected my garden all summer long. However, when I was cleaning out my garden, pulling weeds, I noticed that some of my "weeds" were actually bolted carrots. I thought it happened because I waited too long to harvest, but I always thought carrots were biannual.

Then I noticed another part of the community garden where my neighbor planted and she has a bunch of bolted carrots as well. Why would this happen in the first year of planting? We had a pretty cool summer, with two weeks of a heat wave (90's) early in the summer, and then another week of a heat wave in early September. But in between the temperatures were as low as the high 60's with most days in the low 80s.

Do you think the weird temperatures tricked the carrots into thinking a whole year went by?

**sanderson** 10/3/2013, 10:30 pm

Only took 6 months for these Danvers to get to 2" long! My DD calls them "precious"!

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plantoid 10/4/2013, 7:31 am

gingeandhales wrote:This is my first time planting carrots and I got a tiny little harvest which isn't so bad considering I neglected my garden all summer long. However, when I was cleaning out my garden, pulling weeds, I noticed that some of my "weeds" were actually bolted carrots. I thought it happened because I waited too long to harvest, but I always thought carrots were biannual.

Then I noticed another part of the community garden where my neighbor planted and she has a bunch of bolted carrots as well. Why would this happen in the first year of planting? We had a pretty cool summer, with two weeks of a heat wave (90's) early in the summer, and then another week of a heat wave in early September. But in between the temperatures were as low as the high 60's with most days in the low 80s.

Do you think the weird temperatures tricked the carrots into thinking a whole year went by?

Yes .
Watering insufficiently or erratically then giving them a soaking and a hot dry spell often see carrots bolt ..... even here in the verdant damp UK .

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Carrot Week 2013