6 Secrets For Growing PERFECT Carrots!

you're gonna love this episode if you care at all about growing perfect carrots let's go [Music] hi everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my Gardener Channel in today's episode I'm going to show you how to grow perfect carrots every single time these are Danvers 126 carrots and they look incredible but you can grow any type of carrot perfectly with the help of this video Let's Go All right so the first tip to getting beautiful carrots every single time has everything to do with the soil you'll notice I'm not struggling to harvest these carrots and yes the soil is a little bit damp however the soil itself is very very loose you see the soil that we're growing in is basically a soil that is essentially pure compost that's been amended over time into our native soil our native soil is quite heavy clay and there's no way that we can grow these beautiful carrots in very heavy clay soil because carrots are basically a they're a they're a modified root and a modified root is essentially this is part of the carrot's root system this is not a tuber like say a potato and it's not a bulb like an onion this is actually just a modified root that is meant to store water so that when the carrot goes through a dry spell it can use the water found in the carrot root itself because carrots are actually native to Afghanistan believe it or not and so they're born and bred to essentially grow in very dry arid environments and we've cultivated them for their essentially for their beautiful orange Roots there's also other colored carrots as well which you should try growing but the soil itself is very very loose and that's because they could never grow in very heavy clay soil because they would be restricted and The Roots would have very poor development and in fact the roots would often rot and just kind of Wither away but soil that is too heavy sand as well or too much sand will dry out too fast and you'll end up with a lot of very wiry spindly Roots you're not going to end up with a very thick stem like this it's a sweet spot and again our soil here is absolutely beautiful I think the nicest our soil has ever looked it will hold together well but it also will totally crumble the moment you start to move around with it so this is wonderful and it's very very essential because what it does is it does hold on to enough water but allows water to drain through the soil and encourage that Tap Root to move throughout the soil and the soil is not compacted so the roots are not going to be hitting anything and doing any bending or stuff like that so soil makes a huge difference to getting perfect carrots the second thing that we do to getting beautiful carrots like this holy look at this one look at that dude look at that that is incredible the second thing that we do to getting beautiful carrots like this is we plant at the right time you see a lot of gardeners make the mistake of planting their carrots too late into the season we actually started these about the end of May early June we started them early now see if it's too early and it's too cold carrot seeds won't germinate they're going to sit in the soil and they're going to rot but if it's too hot the seeds won't germinate either so carrot seeds are very finicky about their germination window and so for us I find typically the best time to plant is either just the very end of May to the very beginning of June it's the best time to plant your carrots now also carrot seeds they have very low germination rate and so I will I will typically find that I have to over seed overseeding is very important if you want to make sure you have a nice full row of carrots like this because carrot seeds have a much lower germination rate than say like tomato seeds or pepper seeds you're lucky if you get 70 five to eighty percent germination on carrots typically it's more like 60 to 65 percent so I will typically if I'm making rows I will sew two times the normal amount of seed that I would typically seed that way I have nice full dense rows of carrots and then which we'll talk about I come back and I thin later to get good spacing but that way I have a nice dense planting of carrots so planting at the right time is very important and also tying that into getting high quality seed because carrot seed loses germination rate super fast they only have a viability window about a year to two years at most because of that you want to go with a very high quality seed source so you have success with germination because that germination window is so short if you miss it you're going to miss out on the prime time to grow carrots and so again that's why I densely so that way I know that I have seeds in the ground at the right time I go with fresh seed that way I have the best chance of the seeds germinating and then I basically I I let them essentially just let them go and I don't do anything in terms fitting until I start to get some really well developed carrots that I know are going to be successful and take root there all right the third thing we do to getting oh shoot dude look at that carrot that is a Danvers carrot they're not even supposed to get that big that's insane this is the biggest Danvers carrot I have ever grown in my entire life but it just goes to show that when you follow these tips you yourself can have amazing carrots as well super simply so the third thing that I do is I actually put them in darkness carrot seeds because you have to plant them almost at the surface of the soil do not germinate very well if you leave them exposed to sunlight so what I need to do is I need to cover them up and what I'll do is I'll place a piece of cardboard over top of the space that I'm planting my carrots and I'll weigh them down on the corners with some rocks or some some bricks or something like that so that it doesn't blow away and I will check it periodically after about four to five days to check for carrot sprouts the reason why I do that is because carrot seeds will germinate far better and far more successfully in the dark and because moisture is so critical to the seeds germination that's another thing I'm going to touch on in a second it helps to hold the moisture are near the seeds because if the seeds go dry they're going to die that's a little rhyme that an old Amish farmer taught me when he was growing carrots and he was teaching me how he grew his carrots that's what he taught me if the seeds grow if the seeds go uh the seeds go dry they die it's a little tongue twister but it's super easy to remember all right the fourth thing we do to getting beautiful carrots is we practice what's called Deep watering now we did a whole episode on different watering techniques and if you haven't seen it I highly recommend you go check it out but deep watering is essentially the process of letting your soil dry out periodically and then watering very very deeply because you have to remember the roots job is to go seek out water and if you're watering right at the surface The Roots don't have any incentive to go deeper throughout the soil and so carrots because they are a root just like any other crop if you water right at the surface you're going to end up with a lot of Webby wiry roots and not really thick well-formed carrots so by Deep watering what we're doing is we're encouraging that Taproot to go down deeper in to the soil and because we have a looser soil it allows the water to flow Down Deeper throughout the soil we have probably about eight to ten inches of super loose well-draining soil which is critical so by Deep watering that's going to encourage those tap roots to go all the way down now the next thing we do though is we don't let the soil just turn out you know get bone dry for a super long time we time it out just so that basically when the when the soil is dry about to the very end of the carrot or very bottom of the carrot that's when we're re-roitering because you have to remember see this right here is that Tap Root if this carrot were left you know to go forever a lot of this carrot could continue to grow now it would obviously make the top of the carrot a little tougher a little woodier so it's kind of a fine time when you're going to pick your carrots but eventually these would also get you know filled out right this is just the immature root of the carrot this is still a carrot and so um that's you know that's the secret there because if you let it go bone dry for too long what will happen is these carrots because they're a modified fruit and like I talked about they grow in arid environments the tops of the carrots will use up the water inside of the carrot and you're going to end up with really soft shriveled carrots and they're going to be misshapen and once that happens they actually kind of stop growing and stop forming so um it's it's critical to not let them go too dry for too long but just enough so you can deep water all right the fifth thing that we do to get beautiful carrots like this is we have to fertilize now how we fertilize makes a huge difference on how well the carrots turn out a lot of gardeners make the mistake of over fertilizing now over fertilizing might not seem like a bad thing it might just seem like well I'm just fertilizing more than what the plant needs but in that is how it's a bad thing you see carrots if they're over fertilized they will produce a lot of green growth but not a lot of root development and so you're going to get smaller carrots just a lot of roots but absolutely incredible tops as you might think to yourself my carrots are looking beautiful and then when Harvest time comes you pull it up and it's basically just like all top growth and nothing down below that happens from over fertilizing too much nitrogen can be the culprit of that it also affects things like radishes as well as beets and turnips rutabagas a lot of your other kind of modified root crops like that that are in the kind of similar style of vegetable those will all be affected negatively by 2 much nitrogen and so if your plants are beautiful they're Lush and they're green that could mean you have a little bit too much nitrogen so what we do is in the spring we actually amend our soil only one time and we actually will fertilize with about half as much fertilizer as we would give other things in the garden if we're giving you know per square footage if we're giving and we use Trifecta Plus for our fertilizer we'll use only about uh like two tablespoons per square foot that's about half of what we normally would give normally it's about four tablespoons per square foot but uh but with carrots we want to go about half that because we want to make sure they have some food but not too much to where it prioritizes top growth and you can use whatever fertilizer of choice you go with just remember lighter is better less is more with carrots and some of your other modified root crops all right in the sixth and final thing we do to getting beautiful carrots does come down to thinning you see when you thin these carrots it's going to allow for lots of expansion room for these carrots to get wider later if you've ever had carrots that kind of they look like you're crossing your fingers or they look like a pair of pants that have kind of knotted around each other that's caused from basically the carrots being too close you see carrots they are not like beets they can expand a little bit beets have the ability to kind of expand because they're above the soil they can expand and kind of Mound out carrots because they're below the soil they will push into each other and you'll end up with we have a couple carrots we might have had a little too close together and I'll show you what that looks like because if you don't thin this is what happens see you get really undersized carrots these were some spots that I should have probably came in and thinned a little bit more aggressively but what happened is essentially you see here these carrots turned out beautiful but they were pushing up against all these other little carrots and that's a huge difference these were from the same planting session see this this one's pretty that's you know average size carrot but these carrots are dramatically smaller then these carrots simply because they were from a better spaced portion of my row I'll just go to show you this right here is what I should have thinned a little bit more this over here got thinned perfectly I'll talk about the spacing in a second but the difference if I can find some carrots that are ready to pull are dramatic here you go check it out this is the huge difference look at this absolutely massive so thinning makes a big difference here's another one beautiful so when it comes to thinning your carrots how much do we thin well we typically say we want about an inch and a half to two inches between our plants what we do is when we densely sow our seed we know that we're going to end up with lots of carrots growing probably more than we're going to need but we do that because remember short window for planting carrots very very finite window so because we densely seed it does require going back in thinning we're going to let the carrots grow up we're gonna let them get probably you know three or four weeks old before we start to thin and then once we thin we're gonna pull out the carrots that we don't want basically so we have about an inch and a half to two inches spacing between our carrots and that way when they form they have lots of room in between their plants so that they're not actually kind of like squishing up against each other because that yields smaller smaller uh Roots themselves and that's everything that I know about growing beautiful carrots with a lot of help from from our uh our Amish mentors that I've learned that I've learned um you know about so much of my garden from they also have really helped me with my carrots so I want to thank them for really helping me get these beautiful carrots they're just they're such a wealth of knowledge and if you ever have a chance to go visit some Amish or Mennonite gardening communities definitely go do that they're super friendly they're super down to earth and they'll be happy to help you uh kind of learn the same things that I've learned so um I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learned something new if you did make sure to hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already and send this video with someone that you think could benefit from growing you know more more perfect beautiful carrots so I hope you guys enjoyed and as always this is Luke from the my Gardener Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care everyone bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 47,874

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: wc_k0xXtJj0

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023