carrots going to seed

Hi
I managed to find some carrots that had overwintered last year and I kept them going as they went to see with the hopes that I will have volunteer carrots all of the place. Someone has since told me that they will just become a weed and not actual carrots.
any knowledge about this?
janet

hehehe Where do baby carrots come from, Mommy?

Maybe that person was dealing with hybrids, not open pollinated carrots. You can save seeds from the OP's, but hybrids will not reproduce the same.

j

I had the same experience years back , my original carrots were F1 hybrids.. I'd carefully followed the guides to harvesting the seeds and sowed them in stages a few at a time over the next 12 months .

Not in all the seeds sown came up as carrots , of those that did there were all sorts of differing sizes not the normal 8 inch cones I'd hoped for .
We ate the bigger carrots and fed the others to the dog , guinea pigs and rabbits .

I would have loved to let some of the bigger carrots run to seed and harvested the seed for several years running to see if I could get 10 inch long 3 inches wide ones at the top like Mr French my 74 year old mentor in gardening did . He'd produced most of his own seeds since the 1920's

Hybrids do not make for good seed saving as a rule. They do not come true to parent.

If they are heirlooms, you don't want to save just any seed you can get but rather seeds from a carrot that is true to the variety. Here is a video I watched on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D5TZbbRnJw

Thanks for all the responses
I realize now that the "overwintered carrots" I found (I was cleaning out the garden when my mothers house went for sale, she had a stroke and went into a care facility and i wanted everything from her garden that I could get so I could recreate it)
So needless to say I have no idea what type of seeds they were.

They grew beautiful big heads last summer and the bees and bugs were totally obsessed with them, in fact they totally ignored me when I was around them.
I just left them to scatter in the fall, expecting that, like the dill, I will have carrots popping up everywhere this next year.
I watched the video and read all these posts and realize that perhaps my hopes were rather high.

that being said, I had an incredible carrot harvest this year from the carrots I had planted, and they are all sitting in sand in the cold greenhouse.
So I am wondering if perhaps I can try again this year for a better seed.

I am eventually intending to save seeds once I have mastered all else needed in gardening but for these years that I am still working I thought perhaps of a garden that just seeded itself might be fun.
So I actually let several plants go to seed and I am calling this part of my garden, "the maternity ward."

So thanks for breaking it to me now rather than me wait all next summer for perfect carrots...popping up all over my yard.

Of course the dill has already reproduced a few times,..... like rabbits