I’ve never grown carrots. We do not really have the soil for it – it is heavy clay with lots of stones. We also have a lot of wireworms around here and they do a lot of damage to everything underground. And we have wild carrots and related plants in the surrounding meadows and thus we also have carrot flies. My father tried to grow them once, without success. This year, I decided to give it a try and grow a few. And I did several things to maximize my chances of success.
The first was that I deep-plowed my main vegetable patch, as I said before. And I continued to take stones out of the soil on that patch, which, even after decades of doing so, still produces several buckets every spring (I got three this year again already). If I did not know better, I would have thought that stones grow from the soil and not the other way around. But still, this huge vegetable patch is most definitively the least stony area of my garden.
As the second thing I decided to not sow the seeds directly into the ground but in small seeding trays made from paper egg packages. My father removed the bottoms and filled them with substrate. I wetted the substrate to compress it a little.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
After that I let the seeds germinate on a wet paper towel in a receptacle under a lid. Carrots have a relatively poor germination rate directly in soil and they have to be thinned afterwards. The process of thinning allegedly attracts carrot flies and I wanted to avoid that. Today I carefully picked germinated seeds with a BBQ skewer and I placed one of them into each receptacle in the egg trays. I planted 228 seeds this way (12 trays á 10 and 6 trays á 18).
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I planted the whole trays in the center of the vegetable patches. That way they will be as far from the surrounding grass as possible, which should shield them a bit from both carrot flies and wireworms.
And lastly, for today, I thoroughly watered the planted trays. We shall see if it is a success and they at least poke out of the ground. I have no idea how long it should now take for something green to show up. The only thing I can do now is to water them and wait.
Tomorrow I will start planting onions around these trays. Those should allegedly further repel pests and they also allegedly should not compete much with the carrots. I will probably stop the onion planting about 20 cm from these trays anyway so the carrots have an adequate amount of light.
That’s a really, really cool idea -- I’ll be very interested to hear how it turns out.
I was a bad student, and it’s been quite some time since I had a geology class, but I think I vaguely remember something about some mechanism or other, where rocks break off from the bedrock/regolith, and can rise up through the soil to the surface over time. Not terribly helpful…
I don’t know why, but talking about carrots reminded me of fennel, which grows like a weed around here (San Francisco Bay Area, CA, U.S.),. turns out it is a weed/invasive species. I haven’t attempted to forage any, mostly because I mostly encounter it along freeways and old industrial areas, so I have concerns about pollution and such. Not as versatile as carrots, and can be a bit divisive as to taste.
Anyways, enjoying the gardening posts, looking forward to see how things turn out, thanks for posting. :)
@amts, I saw the idea on YouTube while my back was hurting. I am too curious how it turns out.
@lochaber, I was not particularly good at geology either, but I think I might live in one of those areas. The bedrock here is metamorphic shale (phyllite) with quartz veins. When the phyllite breaks into the soil, it leaves behind the pieces of quartz. They can be quite big sometimes. However, if I remember correctly, it is not so much that the stones travel to the top as it is that the topsoil gets washed/blown away and the stones stay behind.
Fennel is in the same family as carrots and I am allergic to it (as I am to everything in that family, including carrots when raw).
@#2 lochaber
I also live in the Bay Area and when I moved into my house the backyard was overgrown with fennel. Unfortunately, it was not the bulbing variety, but the fronds were useful to flavor fish and any recipe that calls for Tarragon, and I was easily able to harvest all the fennel seeds I could ever need. I did discover a layer of tiny dead gnats or something in my jar of fennel seed, so apparently they incubate their eggs inside the seeds. Depending on your level of disgust, that may put you off foraging for the seeds.
I have found fennel all over the South Bay and around Santa Cruz, so you can easily get some that is not exposed to too much car exhaust, but you will not find the nice bulbs that you see in the markets.
Another thing that grew wild in my backyard was Salsify, which is also called the Oyster Plant. Some people claim the cooked roots taste like oysters, although I don’t get that taste myself, it is just a nice root vegetable that can be used like carrots. However, the wild-grown roots are usually small and woody, I prefer to grow my own.