Carrot grow along - everything you'll need to join in)

We're going to be starting our carrots in mid-March and this is going to be with an earlier variety so Nantes and things like that are fantastic to get in early and they actually produce really fast usually in about 90 days. The early variety that I'm using for this grow along is a variety called Milan and then the main crop variety which we can either sow at a similar time or a little bit later is the Zolvita variety. Now both of these varieties are sold by Tamar Organics and if you sign up for the newsletter you can get a discount code for them as well. The start date for these is going to be mid-March and then we're going to be succession sowing these outside until July. We can then start sowing some undercover right up till sort of September time that's really useful for the Nantes varieties, the ones that are going to grow quicker. Carrots are bi-annual so they will be trying to go to seed in their second year so you do want to make sure that you are harvesting them when they're young and tender or you can also pull them out and then save them for seeds as well if you wanted to. Both these varieties are open pollinated. Other varieties to try would be anything like Amsterdam Forcing, Saint Valery or anything like that. There is a huge variety out there. There's also some really good resistant varieties which will help if you have carrot root fly or if you're growing these in pots then we can also use the round versions or the shorter versions like the Chantenaise. Germination temperature for carrots is actually quite low right down to sort of seven Celsius and then it can go quite high so usually I have found that once the weeds start growing the carrots will start germinating and once that soil is starting to feel warmer. We're waiting till mid-March for this one just to make sure that everybody should be ready to start it. Ideally we're going to get a spacing of between one centimetre and sort of two and a half centimetres however if we sow them really thickly and it is very very difficult not to then we may end up with lots of very small carrots so we will thin them out as we go if needed. This can encourage carrot root fly so if you've got that in your area then you really are going to want to try and keep them sown as carefully as possible to avoid having to do that but also carrot root flies are more active during the day so doing that right late in the evening can help that. So we probably all know that carrots can be really difficult to germinate in certain soils so particularly in clay soils and will fork and be really misshapen if they are in a very highly nutrient soil or in soils that have a lot of stones. So first thing I would do is suggest that you try with what you've got. If you've got a really heavy clay soil then I would lay down an inch or two of compost and sow into that. They will usually work their way through the clay and you'll get some quite good carrots out of it. There are varieties that are said to do better in clay soil so you may want to have a look for those as well, usually the thinner varieties. If you do have beds that you know that are extremely stony then one thing that you could do is sow them into a raised bed and try to make sure that that level of stone is not going to be mixed up too much. The other thing you could do which is painstaking is go through a bed and actually sieve it and make sure that it isn't too stony but that's not always ideal. Or you could just do them into a really large tub and avoid growing them in the ground. So there's lots of different options. You can also mix in with your soil a little bit of horticultural sand. This doesn't always help though so I would be really cautious of doing this and I wouldn't do it before you try growing them first. I would recommend horticultural sand rather than clay sand. You can mix with the clay soil and form like a cement whereas our horticultural sand is much more different shapes, grainier, different texture and should help open that up. But actually with our clay soils just continuing to add more compost year on year will help build that into a much healthier soil and help. You will find with clay soils as well that it will take longer to warm up so make sure that you are happy that it's warm enough before we do sow these seeds as well. We won't be sowing carrots in pots. They will be going directly into the ground. This is because they have a tap root. So if we were to grow them in pots and you can buy them. Usually they're the round varieties so the tap root won't be as damaged by it but they usually will just produce carrots that have gone in all and every direction and won't be those beautiful long carrots that we're hoping for. So I really would avoid trying to buy any or anything like that and just get a packet of seeds. So pests for our carrots. So carrot root fly is obviously a major issue and you'll find that there are many people across the country that will find that they just cannot manage to harvest any carrots with this little pest being an issue. With this we'll just need to keep them netted and use a really fine net to make sure that they can't get in right from the moment those seeds go in till the moment they're harvested and they're all gone. Also make sure that you use crop rotation if you can. If you however have a bed that you use that's particularly one that has looser soil or you've added sand or you've prepared it for it then keeping it netted will be really helpful. Slugs and snails can also be an issue to the young shoots as they emerge. If you joined in right at the beginning with the very first couple of grow alongs we did you'll know I had terrible terrible trouble that year. It wasn't last year it was the year before so 2024 or 2023 I can't remember which year it was but the year that we had so many slugs and snails it was just ridiculous and I really struggled to stop them eating everything. So if you have got a lot of slug issues then obviously keep the beds as clear as possible try not to have any beds with rotting wood around the edge that's really helped me to actually remove those and just go out at night and hunt them pick them up pop them into a pot gloves are definitely essential for this in my opinion and then I move them to my compost bin or you can take them on a walk or something and just dispose of them further away they will home back and can return so moving them a little bit further away is really helpful but moving them to your compost bin will help them with decomposing they are not the terrible pest that everybody thinks they are they are so beneficial in the garden so I don't want to remove all of them from my garden that's for sure and then obviously rabbits can be an issue as well and once again you're just going to keep them netted if you do right from the moment that we pop the seeds in till the moment they're all harvested so we'll have a look at starting those in mid-march I hope that you're wanting to join in if you have got any questions then please do let me know and if you can interact with this video and any of the grow alongs that would really help me reach other people as well and don't forget that there are lots of different videos on YouTube from previous grow alongs that we've done and other perennial grow alongs that are ongoing as well