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Sowing and protecting Carrots

Wednesday, March 12, 2014 5:04

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(Before It's News)

This year I SHALL have good carrots! Well, even if I don’t, it won’t be for want of trying. For the last two or three years I have grown miniature (aka “finger”) carrots, in some plastic boxes raised up above ground level in a wooden planter in order to escape the ravages of Carrot Root Fly. This method has worked well, and has given me a decent crop of baby carrots:

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“Amsterdam 3 – Sprint” (August 2013)

Baby Carrots are all very well, but I want Maincrop Carrots too! I know from previous attempts that growing carrots without proper protection is doomed to failure. They would just be be riddled with flies and unuseable. So this year I am going all-out for “proper protection”.

So the maincrop carrots are going to be grown in my premier raised bed – the big Woodblocx one. They will share it with some parsnips. This bed now has a good depth of soil consisting primarily of home-made compost, but since it is going to play host to the carrots, I have added a bit of sand to improve the drainage:

I dug-over the bed with a hand-trowel, removing any twigs or other debris I could see, and then raked it “to a fine tilth” as they say – in other words until all the lumps were broken down. Conditions seemed perfect for sowing. The soil was damp but not wet, and seemed quite warm to the touch.

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I made a wide (6 inches / 15cm) drill and sowed in it three varieties of carrot: “Early Nantes”, “St.Valery” and “Autumn King”. I sowed fairly thickly, in the full knowledge that if germination is good thinning will be required. Next to the carrots I sowed two types of parsnip in a similar wide drill. They are “Duchess” and “Guernsey Half Long”. Separating the two types of vegetable I sowed a single line of “Cherry Belle” Radishes.

After sowing the seeds I erected the protection. First I pushed in six aluminium tubes from my “Build-a-Ball” kit, and then slotted into them three flexible plastic hoops:

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Then over the top of the hoops went that large piece of Enviromesh that I bought the other day. It is way too big for this present configuration, but I deliberately got a piece that will allow for a taller configuration if I decide to grow something like Brassicas. The excess mesh was rolled up and secured at ground level with a number of bricks.