Vegetables - Carrot

The carrots are the roots of the plant.

I sow carrot outside, in March-April, and do more than one sowing. The seed is small, longer than it is wide. They need to be sown in position, as you can't transplant carrots. But the plants are small so that isn't much of a problem. Do try to sow thinly, though, or you will waste a lot of plants with thinning.

There are many different varieties of carrot. Some aren't even orange! Some grow extra long. There are different shapes, such as cylindrical or cone shaped. I think I prefer orange, but otherwise I have tried various varieites and don't really have a favourite. I do try to avoid expensive F1 varieties (they may be expensive because you don't get much seed in a packet, rather than the packet being expensive itself). Sometimes an F1 variety is worth the cost, but a carrot is a carrot as far as I'm concerned!

The seedlings will need to be thinned once they have come up. If the plants grow too close together, then the carrots can't grow into a decent size. So you have to remove some of the plants, leaving the rest with more room. This can be tricky, as you can pull up the ones you want to leave as well, so be careful! The plants you remove will have very thin, pale carrots as roots, and you can use these in salads, or just eat them! You can also leave the carrots unthinned (if you've sown thinly enough). They will grow, pushing each other to one side or the other. Then you can harvest carrots wherever they grow thickest, leaving the rest to grow bigger.

Carrot roots (the carrots, themselves) do get exposed, either when you harvest some of the carrots, or by pushing themselves out of the soil. This doesn't matter, except the exposed part may grow green or brown. If so, cut that bit off after harvesting. Or you can avoid this by covering any part above ground.

The disease of carrots is carrot fly. The little grubs burrow into the carrot and make holes. If a harvested carrot has carrot fly, you can see it when you cut open the carrot to cook or eat. I just cut the infected bit off and throw it away. I've heard various ideas for dealing with carrot fly, but I don't use any of them.

Carrots take quite a long time to grow large enough to harvest. You can check the size by scraping away the soil to look at the root, then covering them up again. You harvest carrots by pulling up one or more, as you need them, trimming the leaves, and washing them, then cut them up or use them whole, as you wish. You can just crunch raw carrot, grate it to make coleslaw or into a salad or cut it into strips to use in dips. You can cook carrot, by boiling it until tender, or in stews. Carrot and celery make a good combination in stews, as the carrot is sweet and the celery is bitter. You can also grate carrot to make carrot cake - again, this is using the sweet nature of the carrot. I must admit that I mostly use carrot in stews.

Carrots used to be regarded as a herb rather than a vegetable, as was onion. I presume this is because they were used as a flavouring, and so weren't thought of as food. Or perhaps vegetables were thought to be green!

Carrot seeds

Germinating

Seedlings

Bigger plants

Root exposed by harvesting carrot near-by

Carrots pushing themselves out of the soil

A large, unwashed, carrot
(The photo was taken as a boast!)

Washed carrots

Click on photos for large version.