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Relaxed Farming Food: Carrot
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| Carrots may well be one of the easiest vegetables to grow, and one of the earliest to sow in the polytunnel. The photo below shows young carrot seedlings at 20 days old, having been planted on 14th May. The carrot seeds are very small and quite difficult to sow thinly (as shown in the photo on the right) so for some of the seeds we mix them with dry sand and then carefully sprinkle in a row in the polytunnel beds. For the early salad carrots we do not need to be so careful - these are picked in 'bunches', tops taken off and fed to the goats, popped up to the kitchen, washed, topped and tailed and either eaten raw or lightly steamed (whole or chopped into slices).
Our carrot seedlings are a little too close together -
we will need to 'pull' some to leave room for others to grow.  |
We were a little too generous with sowing seeds for the bunches of carrots in the photo below, but this is not a problem as we will be 'pulling' the carrots before they get too much bigger.
One of the problems we face with carrots is the 'carrot fly', a tiny pest which burrows into the carrots causing them to go brown and rot. We plant our onions and garlic very close to the carrots to deter the carrot fly - the strong smell masks the scent of the carrots!  |