My Garden: How I Plant Carrots

I got sick and tired of pulling up funny shaped carrots that are all twisted and hard to cook with so I worked out a better way to plant my carrot seeds!

When I was a kid I used to love eating carrots straight from the garden. Sometimes they would be funny shapes, a bit twisted and bent, but they always tasted way better than the bought ones!

When I got back into growing vegetables a couple of years ago a carrot patch was one of the first things that I planted. I tried to plant the carrot seeds quite thinly but there were still a few that were growing a bit too close together. This usually results in carrots that grow in funny shapes!

I know that you are supposed to thin the carrots out but it seems such a shame to have to pull out the little carrots before they are usable. So I ended up with some carrots that were a bit odd shaped!

I decided to try a different carrot sowing technique last year and was pleasantly surprised by the wonderfully big straight carrots that we harvested. They looked like the nicely shaped bought carrots but they had the delicious taste of home grown carrots!

I found that the secret to getting big, nice shaped carrots is to plant individual carrot seeds. I know that it might seem a bit tedious to have to pick out the individual carrot seeds and plant them one by one but boy is it worth the effort! You wouldn’t do this if you wanted to plant a field of carrots but it is not too hard if you only need a small patch in a home vegetable garden.

Last year I planted successive carrot patches this way and not one of the carrots was wasted! If the seed germinated it then had enough room to grow and went on to produce an excellent carrot.

I have repeated this process this spring and so far I have go a wonderful patch of carrots growing. I can’t wait for them to get a bit bigger so that I can try one!

Don’t forget that you still need to have nice open soil (not rocky and hard) to plant your carrots in and you also have to give them consistent watering.