Carrots are one of the main crops that I grow in my gardens, and when they’re grown well
can be really high yielding, but they can be a tricky crop to grow.
It’s sometimes hard to get the tiny seeds to germinate, there's a few problematic pest
issues that we need to deal with, and it's essential to thin the seedlings adequately
in order to get a decent yield of reasonable sized roots.
But I never really know how the crop is developing until I start to pull or dig the roots out
of the soil, and quite often the roots are split, or forked or the shape that I would
prefer. For several years now I have been growing
the same variety of large storage carrots, and this season i decided to sow a batch in
six of my family scale gardens, each of which is being managed using a different method.
Now that I have finished most of the harvesting, it's interesting to see the different size
of the roots from each of the gardens and what proportion of the roots were forked.
And I was quite surprised by the difference between the gardens, especially with the wild
shapes of carrots that were being pulled out of one of the gardens.
I have been getting really good results from growing this type of carrot in my Extensive
Garden over the last few years, and this year was also a good crop.
The wide spacing of the rows, the large variety and a long growing season, all combined to
produce a lot of quite large roots, that were in good shape for the most part, though a
few of them were forked or split. I had sown these seeds at the beginning of
May, a few days after I had dug out the remaining old chard plants from the same bed, which
had grown quite big over the winter and into the spring.
I had forked the soil a bit to loosen it, but not excessively, and then I worked in
a few fertility amendments into the surface of the soil as I raked a seedbed for the tiny
seeds. This recent soil cultivation could have caused
some of the carrot roots to fork, possibly when they grew into air spaces within the
soil that hadn’t had a chance to settle yet, but it could also have been due to stones
that were still in the soil. I did notice that the forked roots seemed
to be more clustered together, rather than randomly spread along the row, and this led
me to suspect that the decomposition of the remains of the large root system from the
chard plants might have caused the forking of the tender roots of the carrot seedlings.
It would be quite interesting if the clusters of forked carrot roots correlated to where
the last few overwintering plants had been growing, but I can’t remember where they
had been in the row.
This crop of carrots from the Intensive Garden was good this year, similar to what I have
been able to harvest over the last few years, producing quite a high yield of slightly smaller
roots in a fairly densely spaced bed. It was nice to be able to pull out quite a
few clean, good shaped roots, and some of them were quite big and long, especially at
the edge of bed. There were some forked roots, but they seemed
to be more randomly spaced across the bed, and the forking occurred at various depths
of the different roots. These seeds were sown on the same day as they
were in the Extensive Garden, but the soil had had longer time to settle before hand.
While the fixed beds in this garden are typically double dug each season, which is a process
of loosening the soil quite deeply, adding lots of fertility, and removing most of the
stones, I decide to not dig this bed prior to the carrots this season, thinking that
the digging that I had done before the previous crop would have been enough.
The remains of the old crops and any weeds had been cleared from the bed at the end of
February, a couple of months before sowing, but a layer of low fertility compost had been
shallowly worked into the soil surface just before sowing the carrot seeds.
This recent addition of compost could have caused some of the roots to split near their
top, but would not have had an impact deeper in the soil.
Some of the roots were really long and pointed, which is typical of this variety, but others
seem more stunted or blunt ended, and I’m not sure what caused these, but perhaps I
just need to accept all of this, and a certain amount of forking as a natural variation within
this open pollinated variety.
In comparison to the other gardens, I was quite surprised by the number of forked carrot
roots that were growing in the No-Dig Garden, and I've not seen this type of forking before,
and I can only think that it was due to the way the beds in this garden were prepared.
I had cleared the soil surface of all weeds and old plant debris in February, and then
in the beginning of April I had added a thick layer of finished compost on top of the soil
surface. This was the first time that I had tried using
this particular No-Dig method with root crops like this, which involved me buying in large
quantities of finished compost which was sterile, but not very rich in fertility nor fully decomposed.
A lot of the forking of these carrots was right at the top of the root, and in in many
cases seemed to coincide with the bottom of the layer of compost, or the top of the soil.
This sudden change of growing medium seems to have had an impact on the first thin tap
root that was sent out by the carrot seedling. I’m not sure if it was a physical issue,
and I suspect that there had been enough time for lots of biological activity to develop
at the interface between the compost and soil below, but not enough time for the compost
to really settle in. Or perhaps there was just too much biological
activity for the delicate roots of carrot seedlings to manage, and instead they branched
out, producing some crazy root structures.
Thing were quite different in the Polyculture Garden where the carrots and parsnips are
interplanted between established onions and garlic plants.
The crop this season was disappointing, partially due to the slightly later sowing, not thinning
enough or when the plants were small enough and I’m not sure if there was enough soil
fertility to go around. I also failed to keep the carrot fly away
from this crop. But the roots of most of the carrots were
not forked, and the interplanted parsnip roots were all straight and deep.
I think that this is mostly due tot he fact that the soil in this bed had been sieved
in the previous October while harvesting the last of the potato crop, which would have
removed a lot of stones, and then compost had been added to the surface of the bed at
the same time. The overwintering onions sets and garlic were
planted in December, and by the time carrot and parsnip seeds were sown later in May,
the soil would have had more than 7 months to settle in, and I think this really helped
to reduce the number of forked roots.
I think the settled soil of the carrot bed also helped the crop in the protected Polytunnel
Garden, where the same variety had been sown at the beginning of July, after overwintering
onions had been harvested. The soil in this garden has been dug over
quite deeply for many seasons, and most of the stones had been removed in the process,
and the soil has become loose with a good texture.
But the only work on the soil that I did just before sowing this batch of carrot seeds was
to level the surface a bit, so the depth of the bed had been undisturbed since before
the onions were planted 7 months earlier. The result was that almost all of the carrots
were straight and I think I found only one root that was forked.
This was my best crop of carrots in terms of root shape, but unfortunately I had not
covered the crop with a mesh early enough and the patch had ended up being quite infested
with carrot root fly, which was really disappointing.
The largest batch of this variety of carrots was grown in the Simple Garden in soil that
had been sieved to remove the remains of the potato crop, as well as any stones and larger
weed roots from the topsoil. But unlike in the Polyculture Garden, this
work was only done at the beginning of February, and then some fertility amendments had shallowly
worked into the surface of the soil, before it was covered and allowed to settle for only
2 or 3 months. I have harvested a pretty good crop out of
this garden, with a fair number of well shaped roots.
But there's also a fair amount of forked roots, and some showing signs of rot and cracking,
perhaps more than in most of the other gardens. I am not sure what the issues are with this
large crop, but I suspect that once again the soil probably needed to settle a bit more
before the carrot seeds were sown.
Having finished harvesting all of the carrots, I think I can make some interesting general
observations about all of this. The carrot roots seem to be generally less
forked when they're grown in soil that had a fair amount of time to settle since it was
last dug, and perhaps even better if a compatible crop had already been growing in the soil
such as with the onions in the Polytunnel Garden and in the Polyculture Garden.
Stones in the soil may be an issue, but it doesn’t seem to be an important factor as
there were quite a few forked carrot roots in the Simple Garden which had had most of
the stones removed from the layer of topsoil. The remains of the roots of some plants that
were grown in the same soil before the carrots may cause problem as they decompose, which
may have been the main factor with the chard plants in the Extensive Garden, but the onions
in the Polytunnel didn’t seem to be an issue. A recent addition of a thick layer of compost
onto the surface of the soil can cause issues for young carrot seedlings, as can be seen
with the dramatic shapes of some of carrot roots from the No-Dig Garden, but it probably
depends on the quality of the compost, and the amount of time that things have had to
settle in. Of course all of these forked carrots are
still edible, but they are more difficult to clean and prepare in the kitchen, and they
are more difficult to store. Forked carrots also seem to be more susceptible
to splitting and a certain type of rotting of the root, but I am not sure where the correlation
and causation lies with all of this. I plan to process and eat all of the forked
and damaged carrots first, and to only store the really well shaped carrots for use later
in the winter and into next spring. I am going to make sure that I finish any
digging and other soil preparation work for next years crop as soon as possible, to allow
the soil to settle, and I’m seriously considering pulling out any crops that are already in
the ground earlier rather than later, and it’ll be interesting to see how many carrots
I get in next year’s crop because of all of this work.