hello and welcome to gardening and 58 north in this video i'd like to show you guys how to make carrot
tops and how to grow carrot tops so you can have a harvest of fresh carrot leaves so first of all
what you'll need is a chopping board and a knife some carrots either a dish or a small pot of
compost but you can also grow them outdoors so what you want to do with the carrots is as you're
cutting them for cooking you often you need to take the top off because you can't eat the top so
what this is is basically recycling the top and regrowing that so that you can have some carrot
greens now growing a carrot top you're never going to get a new carrot what happens with carrots is
in the first year of growth they put all their energy into the root and that's basically where
they store all the energy for next year then in the second year they use all that energy they've
stored in the root along with some energy from the sun as they're growing to flower and produce
seeds for next year so the second this is going to be one year old now because it's one year old
carrots they're never going to be able to produce any more roots so when you do a carrot top you'll
never be able to grow a carrot again but you'll grow plenty of leaves and those leaves you can still
eat so looking we want to find a decent carrot you don't want one that you've got too much rot at
the top or too much damage at the top and you want to cut off probably about a couple of centimeters
so just a bit more than you would cut off when compared with cutting it when you're normally
doing it for groceries so often when I'm cooking I would only cut a very thin sliver but you want to
cut probably at least two centimeters or so off just to give it a better chance of survival you
can actually grow them even if they're very thin so if you're growing these if you've got several
carrot tops and they're very thin you can still grow them but I'll go into why there's less success
rate with that now the reason is the roots on the carrot they don't grow out from the middle the
middle is just a storage area where they store their their carbohydrates for growing next year
the roots actually come out from these little eyes that are on the side a bit like an eye on
a potato it's where the roots grow out and so these little dents on the side of the carrot
is where you'll see the new root growth and that's why you want to cut off a probably a couple
of centimetres because if you don't have any of these small eyes then you won't get any roots
growing so if you're just growing it in water all you need to do is place it on a on a saucer
it's quite simple you just need to place it on the saucer give it some water and leave it in a sunny
position now you don't want to be giving it the midday Sun so it doesn't want to get too sunny you
just want some good bright light I'm just going to cover it up there so I'm wanting to cover about
half it with water so that should be about enough water for this so you can see there about half
the carrot is covered in water when this is when you situate this in a nice warm
position with plenty of light what will happen is you'll soon get roots starting to grow out
this method is probably the best method if you're doing it with kids or you're just interested
to see how the roots look because at every stage you can see the roots growing and see how it develops
over time and what will happen is you'll first of all get a bit of root growth and some leaf growth
there wont be a lot of not much happening in the first couple of days but once the roots get
established there will be a lot of top growth and you get lots of leaves and you can get quite
a sizable amount of leaves this method though if you're growing it for just harvesting the leaves
you're not going to get the best results the reason for that is because carrots eventually
will rot off if they're left in water for too long the infection will often get into this part and
you'll find it rotting off what you'll also need to do is if you grow it in water is you need to replace
the water every few days that's to make sure it doesn't get stagnant and to make sure it doesn't
start to rot so you make sure you replace the water regularly and you will get quite a few
leaves but the problem is if the leaves get too large they can become top-heavy and fall over
as I say they don't grow in water forever so this this method is probably good for probably about a
month or two but it's probably the best method if you wanted to see the roots grow because you
can really see it nice and clearly so the second method is this one here all you need to do for
this one here is you grow it in soil and this will give you a longer and better results so what you
really want to do is you wanna let this dry out once the carrot dries out at the bottom it will
callus over and that'll mean there will be less chance of infection because if you if you don't let it
callus over this they can get infection into the bottom of the carrot and then therefore it
can rot off after a few weeks but if you just leave it you cut it leave it somewhere cool
and dry probably in the dark for about three or four days this will dry up callus over have much less
chance of getting any rot then what you want to do is you just want to create a small hollow in
the soil and you want to bury the carrot so that only the very top is on show and that way you'll get
the most amount of root space for it so you just want to bury it like this so you just got a tiny
bit at the top on show so that's where the leaves can come from and the rest is where the roots are
going to grow carrots tend to do much better in here I mean in the wild they grow in soil anyway
so soil is a much better environment for them the soil also has nutrients as well so
you can continue growing for much longer whereas the water there's very few nutrients in tap water so
this is not likely to grow too long also you're not as likely to get any rot problems as long as you
dry it out before you plant it so this would grow a lot bigger in the long run again this
will probably give you about three or four months where this will probably only give you one or two
months of growth before this starts to rot this wont rot off in the end but what will happen is
because this is the second year of growth for a carrot what I plant what the plant wants to
do is produce seeds so it can reproduce for next year so what will happen is we get a huge amount
of leaf growth in the beginning but then after a couple of months what you'll find is you'll get
a flower stalk growing once the flower stalk grows this will put out some nice small white flowers
very small but it does have hundreds of them so not too bad display and they normally grow about a foot or
two tall but once it's finished flowering all the energy then goes into the flowers you won't get
any more leaves anymore so if you want to promote some more leaves you can cut off the flower stalk
and that will keep the plant alive for a little bit longer but you still won't get a huge amount more
leaf growth because that's carrot basically done for the time of year so you but you will get a
couple of months of leaves which will be plenty to eat so you can do this with any carrots
as I say you can also do it with a few other plants carrots are probably one of the best examples I'll
leave you guys with the time-lapse now so you can see how these two do over the next few weeks