The carrot crop is one of the vegetables that we grow that hold us in suspense the longest.
With almost all of the other vegetable plants that we grow, we can usually tell
how they are progressing during the season, and often we are harvesting as they grow.
With carrots, as well as parsnip and potatoes, we can see the green growth above ground,
which can be a reasonable indication about how well the plants are growing,
but not necessarily how well the part that we want to eat is developing under the soil.
I occasionally pull out a few carrots, to see how they are doing, but in order to keep away
the carrot root fly, the crops of carrots are usually covered with a fine netting,
that we try to leave in place for the full growing season.
So the crop is further obscured, and it is only when we finally harvest them that we
can see what kind of crop we end up with, if it is a high yield of well formed carrots,
or if there are lots of issues with forking, damage, carrot fly or other pests.
With the large bed of main crop storage carrots that we grew in the Simple Garden this year,
the anticipation was greater because we sowed 9 different varieties,
some of which we have not grown before. So digging up this full crop all at once
this week was quite a big reveal for us, and it was an impressive crop of fairly decent roots,
with some interesting variation between the varieties, but also really disappointing.
One of the things that I really like about a main crop like this,
and with the Simple Garden in general, is that I can ignore it for most of the season,
and apart from a few key tasks at particular times of the year, we just leave it alone to grow.
So it is easy to forget about, especially with the mesh covering
the plants and the dense foliage obscuring the plants in the middle of the wide bed.
But now at the end of the season, when most of the other tasks are done in the gardens,
and with the foliage on a lot of the carrot plants dying back,
I was beginning to really wonder what was going on with this crop.
I pulled off the mesh that had been in place since the plants were at seedling stage,
and started to loosen the soil and dig out the carrots and I was quite please with
how well the crop had done in some ways. I removed the tops of the plants as I dug,
placing the roots on the soil beside where they had grown so that I would
have a chance to see any localised issues, and to visually compare the 9 different varieties.
There was quite a full crop, with very few gaps in the germination of the seeds,
and we didn’t have the issue of slugs killing off the tops of the seedlings early in the season.
In previous years we had lost a lot plants from this early pest damage, but this year we had
managed to really reduce the presence of slugs in and around the gardens early in the season.
And there was not a lot of signs of the mature roots being eaten by slugs,
which had been an issue in previous years. There was also not any sign of rat damage,
which was a major issue a few years ago with rats eating the top of a lot of roots
in the middle of the bed, something I wasn’t aware of until harvesting.
I figured it would not be an issue this season as I have been a lot more successful at keeping the
rat population under control in the area, and it was great to not have any damage like this.
So there was quite a consistent crop of carrots over the full bed, due to decent seed quality,
good sowing technique and keeping the soil adequately moist until the seedlings were properly
established, and eliminating the slug damage. It was quite a wonderful sight once all the
roots were harvested, and I don’t think I have grown such a full crop like this before.
It was a really significant change compared to the miserable crop we had last year,
with big empty patches in the germination, and a lot of forked and miss-shaped roots.
There was a bit of forking throughout the bed this year,
but less than previous years, though still more than I would have liked.
And there was a lot more forking with one of the longer varieties, which was disappointing,
and a lot less forking with a really stubby variety, which makes sense.
I am still trying to understand the different issues that can cause forking of carrot roots, and
recent cultivation of the soil is a possibility. The soil of this bed had been fully dug over
last autumn when the previous crop of potatoes had been harvested, and the bed for both the
carrots and onions were established then, and then covered for the winter with ground cover fabric.
The fabric was removed at the end of April, and apart from digging out a few potatoes
that we had missed which had re-sprouted, and flame weeding the bed before sowing,
the soil was left to settle for about 6 months before the carrot seeds germinated.
There also had not been any organic matter added to this bed since the
sheet mulching for the squash crop had been removed a year and half earlier.
We used chicken manure pellets to supplement the fertility of the potato crop last year
and added a bit more to the surface of the bed before covering the soil for the winter.
But it is possible that in digging out the potatoes, organic matter that was on the
surface of the soil, or even the remains of some of the potato roots could still
be decomposing when the young carrot roots were first growing down through the soil.
Apart from the the one variety that forked a lot more, the forked roots seemed to be random
or clustered in a few places, and at least this year it is not so much to worry about,
but still something I would like to see a lot less of.
The other obvious issue with some of the carrot roots was the splitting or cracking,
but this seemed to be mainly on the one side of the bed adjacent to the path where less
competition allowed the roots to get a lot bigger. The roots on the other side of the bed were not
as big, but still larger than the roots in the centre of this 1.25m wide bed, which makes sense.
Looking at all of the roots laid out like this it was fairly obvious that some of
the varieties produced significantly more than others, but they were all fairly good.
After weighing them all, one variety produced just under 9kg/m2, three producing between 10
and 12 kg/m2, and the remaining 5 varieties producing more than 12.5kg/m2 which is a lot.
And counting the extra rows at either end of the bed that we grew to provide more consistent
growing conditions for each variety, we harvested a total of 145kg of carrots out of this 12.5m2
bed, which gives a yield of about 11.5kg/m2. This is just a bit lower than the huge harvest
of carrots that I got from this same bed 5 years ago, the year I started this garden.
Since then only one other year had a good harvest, and there were three others that
had quite poor harvests in comparison, mainly due to germination or pest issues.
For the past few years carrot fly maggots or larva have been a real issue with the carrots in all the
gardens, and the reason we try to keep the plants covered with the fine mesh for the full season.
I had hoped that we had been successful at keeping they away this season,
but when I was pulling out these carrots from the Simple Garden this year,
I noticed that there was some signs of damage by these burrowing larvae, which was disappointing.
But I didn’t know the extent of the carrot fly damage,
or if any of the varieties were worse affected than the others, until I washed all the roots.
And washing one variety after another revealed just how extensive the carrot fly damage was,
in all of the varieties, and this was really disappointing,
as it suddenly turned what seems like a great crop into a much less successful yield.
Most of the roots were affected, but there seemed to be more damage at the south end of the bed,
and perhaps this is where the small flies first got in to lay their eggs
at the base of the carrot leaves. Or it could be that some varieties
are more susceptible than others, but it is hard to tell with this one crop.
One of the varieties in the middle of the bed I had hoped would be spared
as it was supposedly bred to be less susceptible to this major carrot pest.
But there was still a fair amount of carrot fly damage to these roots, though noticeably
less than with a lot of the other varieties, and I guess slightly less affected is as good as it gets
So, a big disappointment, especially with almost 150kg of carrots harvested out of this one garden.
And I imagine that without the carrot fly larvae eating away at the roots, which no doubt
suppressing the vigour of the plants, the yield of most of the varieties could have been even bigger.
There is still a lot of useable carrot in all of that, but the tunnels made by the larvae make it
more time consuming to process the carrots in the kitchen, with a lot more wasted, and it is
hard to sell of pass on carrots with this kind of damage, and storage becomes less successful.
I am not sure how the carrot fly got into this crop.
It could have been though some of the small holes in the mesh, or under the edge ad some point,
or even during the brief period when the edge of the mesh was lifted for thinning and weeding.
But I suspect that a few flies had found the tiny carrot seedlings in the week after germination,
before the full bed was covered with the mesh, and this pest was able to go through several
lifecycles trapped in with the carrots, greatly increasing the population with every generation.
We also grew one of these main crop carrot varieties in 3 of the other family scale gardens.
In the Intensive Garden there was a lot of carrot fly among the roots, quite a bit more than the
larger variety trial, because the mesh hadn’t fully covered the bed for part of the season.
And here was a fair amount of forking of the roots in this batch as well,
and I wonder how much of it is because we had mistakenly dug a fair amount of
compost into this double dug bed at the end of last year.
The Extensive Garden had less carrot fly damage, but almost all of the roots were forked,
and quite heavily, and a lot of them quite close to the surface of the soil, most likely because
I had dug some concentrated fertility into the top layer of the soil earlier in the spring.
But it was the No-Dig Garden that had the best crop of the season,
with a big yield of well developed roots, with very few of the roots forking or splitting.
This was a significant change from the same garden last year that had
a fair amount of misshaped roots, but I had added the usual amount of 2.5cm
of compost onto the surface of the bed a few months before sowing last year.
With the same crop this year in the same garden, I decided against adding any
additional compost onto the bed, and sowed the carrots directly into the undisturbed layer of
quite decomposed compost that had been added to the surface of the soil in previous years.
And this seemed to have worked out really well, or that is the only thing I can think of that
led to a lot less forking than the previous year in this garden or in any other garden.
But there was still a fair amount of carrot fly damage on these roots.
So, the big reveal of carrots this year was really disappointing, mainly because of the carrot fly,
and we need to be a lot more careful about preventing this pest in the future.
But I learned a lot and we are getting closer to being able to produce a much better and more
consistent crop of this really useful vegetable, that I have found to be quite difficult to grow.
But we have a lot of carrots to eat, more than enough,
though they will take longer to process and they likely won’t store as well,
and the carrot fly damage makes them harder to share with others.
The yields in the region of 12kg/m2 are great, especially
if we can control the carrot fly in the future. And I find it interesting that two of the open
pollinated varieties that I have grown a lot of in the past did reasonably well with this trial,
and there are other varieties that I would be interested in trying again.
I am not so sure about buying in the more expensive hybrid seeds,
at least based on this one trial, but I still need to properly evaluate the taste and possible uses
for all of them, before eliminating any variety. It was great to get consistent seed germination
over the full bed, and to be able to eliminate slug damage early in the season.
And digging out a full crop of the large bed in this Simple Garden was really great,
at least until I washed them and saw the extent of the carrot fly damage.
But it was definitely the carrots that I pulled out of the No-Dig Garden that impressed me the
most this year, and it shows that I am finally getting somewhere with this problematic crop.