How to Grow Carrots and Beets From Seed... and Have Success!

today we're going to be starting carrots and beets I did a few videos several years ago on different ways to have success with carrots I wanted to put all those ideas together in one video plus talk about how to grow them after you've successfully germinated them which germinating is the hardest part and then we're going to touch on beets but beets are much easier root crops are so much fun to grow because it's always a surprise you don't know what the outcome is going to be until you harvest it you have no idea what's going on under the ground until you actually pull it out of the ground and so it really adds a whole another dimension of fun to the garden and it's great for kids I think it's really important for kids to be a part of growing food and knowing where their food comes from but they love doing this because they too like the mystery of what's under the ground it's like digging up treasure carrots are a cool season crop usually grown in the fall and spring and even winter in mild climates like mine carrots are very finicky about the soil that they're grown in though now we've all seen those funny misshapen carrots sometimes obscene carrots on Facebook and Instagram and that is typically because of some type of object generally a little Pebble that's somewhere in the soil and carrots won't push the little pebble out of the way they're going to Fork to go around it or twist and turn just to kind of move past the stone and so that's where you're going to get those funny shapes if you're not after those funny shapes unless you have really really great light Sandy Airy soil in the ground you're going to want to either grow carrots in a raised bed or some kind of container that's got a you know a light potting mix now carrot seeds are really really tiny so to plant one at a time would take the patience of not me now if you can do it go for it but for the rest of us you're gonna want to just uh broadcast the seeds over an area thin them once they come up and move on you want to grow your carrots in full sun in again well-draining light soil or potting mix and the thing also with carrot seeds is they're so small that they need to be surface sewn means meaning not covered up with any potting mix after you've put them out unfortunately the other thing about carrots is they need constant moisture to germinate so we're not covering the seed with any soil to hold in the moisture so your job as a gardener is to camp out for the next 10 to 14 days sometimes three weeks right next to your carrot bed and every hour or two use a spray bottle or something to keep that moisture level up but it's so worth it when you see those tiny little carrot sprouts no it definitely isn't the problem is how do we keep the carrot seeds moist with no soil cover there are a couple of ways that have been successful for me the first one is to broadcast your seeds where they will be growing directly in the garden water them in well and place a board or a piece of cardboard weighted down so it doesn't blow away place that over them and that should hold in the moisture until germination at around the 7 to 10 day Mark start checking under the board once or twice a day and once you see Sprouts remove the board immediately water well again and they will start to grow and put down their tap roots to help them take moisture from deeper down the other way which I'm going to do right now is to pre-sprout your carrots to do that you need a paper plate some pre-moistened potting mix preferably seed starting mix put the pre-moistened potting mix on the plate broadcast your seeds over it and you want to do this fairly thickly because we will be spreading them out once we're into the next step place the plate in a Ziploc bag and zip it closed and put that plate in the freezer for 24 hours no more no less 24 hours is the magic number and then once you take it out place it on top of an appliance that gives a little bit of heat off to give it some bottom heat a heat mat for seedlings if you have one set at 75 would work great a little light is good just don't put them in the sun they will cook inside the bag and then the waiting period begins and during that waiting period make sure that you have the space in your garden ready to go and after about seven days like you won't be checking them earlier you can start to check on them twice a day and see if they've started to germinate again you're looking for little white Sprouts if you see green they'll probably still work but you've waited a little bit long so in this plate I waited one day too long and they're starting to show some green on some of them but when you see these Sprouts preferably still in the white stage run them out to the garden and sprinkle the Sprouts the potting mix and all around the space or in a line if you're growing them in a row you need to cover them now with about an eighth of an inch of potting mix just barely covering them water them well but gently and in a few days the leaves will start to poke through and they will start to grow now even with this method you'll probably still have some or most of your carrots growing too close together so let's talk about spacing and thinning you can look at the package for spacing instructions because each variety is size will differ and if you know the variety and the size you just want to make sure that they have some Elbow Room between each one and I know thinning is hard it's hard to take perfectly innocent seedlings yank them out of the ground and throw them away so don't do that don't yank trim take scissors and trim them off at ground level leaving the one you want to keep every inch or so and don't throw the thinnings out carrot sprouts or you might say carrot micro greens are super tasty they taste like carrot and you can toss them in a salad or in soups so their little lives don't have to be ended in vain but thinning is hard nonetheless it will reward you with a better harvest in the ones that you leave in so now moving on to beets carrots are finicky about soil beets not so much they will produce a more perfect shaped roots in a lighter soil but they really will grow in just about anything and they're actually a bit of a Workhorse in the garden if you have clay soil as the beets start to expand they can actually help break up that soil so you may not have beautiful beets to show on Instagram but you might have better soil come springtime or a little later in the summer planting time depending on where you are if you live in a cold climate you're going to want to plant beets and carrots about two to three weeks before your first frost date that's going to give them enough time to grow and start expanding but they are very Frost tolerant beet seeds are actually really easy to plant because they're big another difference between them and carrots now the seeds of beets are actually the small shriveled fruit that grows on the Beet plant and so it's not just one seed in there you think of a fruit you've got several seeds inside so even if you plant each seed perfectly in a spacing that you need you're going to need to thin because a lot of beets are going to come up per seed that you plant you're going to do it the same way as carrots use scissors snip them off the thinnings are really great just like carrots they don't taste like beets though they they just have a different flavor fertilizing for both of these root crops are actually very different for carrots too much nitrogen will cause a lot of top growth in the greens but not so much root development and so for carrots and organic fertilizer with a higher middle number like Neptune's Harvest Rose and flowering formula and bone meal would be good choices for the Beats they actually love nitrogen and phosphorus so the rose and flowering formula from Neptune's Harvest blood meal maybe a mixture of the two would be a good choice for them both crops however they do need even even watering and a consistently moist root run if you allow the soil to dry out too much the beets are going to develop a woody exterior the carrots will crack and split and neither are going to be very tender at all one other tip back when the beets were first starting to be grown way back I don't know how long ago that was they were not grown for their Roots they were grown for the tops or the leaves because they're super nutritious they actually taste really good I'm um if you if you cooked beets in my opinion they are better than cooked spinach leaves they don't have that really heavy iron flavor you can saute them the greens with garlic and onions salt and pepper they're great give it a try and so while you're waiting for the roots to develop you can harvest the outer leaves and still have a crop so I hope you learned something in this video if you did please give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't share it with a friend and I'll see you next time

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 59,862

Keywords: how to grow carrots, growing carrots, how to, grow, beets, how to grow beets, how to grow carrots from seed, from seed, carrots, next level gardening, organic, organic gardening

Id: vEJ8M_cbW_E

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022