Carrots are one of the most important root vegetables you can grow if you’re cooking from your garden. They’re critical for a mirepoix, they’re packed with flavor, and they’re quite good both cooked and raw. Carrots are also a nutritious snack and a good source of some complex compounds that good for your health.
Carrot Details:
- Family: Apiaceae
- Growing Season: Spring or Fall, continual planting is possible in some climates
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 3-4 inches (7-10 cm) apart, 12 inches (30 cm) between rows if planting in the ground.
- Seed to Harvest time: 50 to 80 days
- Indoor Starting: not recommended as most do not survive transplant and transplanted carrots have poor root development.
- Earliest Planting: After danger of frost
- Watering: Keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not over water. Great plants for drip irrigation or other forms of automated light watering. Avoid watering leaves and focus on the soil.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: plant seeds 1/2 inch (1-2 cm) deep in loose soil.
- Weeding: Weed regularly as competing weeds can cause your carrots be grow misshapen.
- Harvesting: Simply pull up gently but firmly from the base of the stalks. If they resist twist lightly to loosen the soil or use a gardeners hori hori (long sharp nose hand spade).
- Known Pests: Aster yellow disease, untreatable – prevent by introducing predatory insects that repel leafhopper that care the disease or use sticky traps around your carrots. Fusarium, pick carrots when ripe to prevent this rot inducing root fungus.
More About Carrots
Carrots are relatively easy to grow and essential in the kitchen. Because of this they have earned their spot in most home gardens. The biggest issue that people face when growing carrots is often not a disease or soil problem, but their own ambitious over crowding. Carrots can easily crowd each other out and planting even slightly too close together can lead to an unsatisfying yield of gnarled roots and stunted carrots.
If you give carrots enough space and plant them in clay free soil you can often easily grow a respectable crop that keeps well and has tons of uses.
Another topic for carrots is that they are stereotypically known to be a great attractor to pests like rabbits, moles, and other digging mammals. While it is true that these pests will enjoy the plants, they tend to stay away from a well kept garden as they don’t find the area to be a safe place to be. This is even more true when you have abundant areas for wildlife nearby. Sure you might loose some crops to the adventurous animal or two, but generally they’re not all that hard to scare away.
In the case where you have mammalian animals eating your crops the best defense is using coyote urine. The urine of other large predators can be sprayed around the borders of your property and keep many animals away. This also works at deterring out door cats, rodents, deer, so it’s an easy fix for a simple problem.
Carrot Tasting and Food Notes
A lot can be written about carrots and their uses in foods. They are a base for mirepoix which is essential in french cooking. They have a earthy sweet flavor and wonderfully complex aroma that make them highly desirable for food. On their own raw they are fine, but they really shine best as a component in other dishes.
Carrots, like most high fiber root vegetables, keep fairly well in cool temperatures. Carrots can sometimes keep for months if stored properly, so it makes sense that they’re desirable in cooking.
In terms of preparation carrots can do it all. They are good raw, fried, roasted, sauteed, steamed, or even in a smoothy. Their sweetness coupled with their earthy root vegetable notes makes them the perfect bridge from sweet to savory food and an incredible pairing in so many dishes.
Due to the sheer scale of their uses in food we will simply leave the tasting notes at this: they are an essential in almost any kitchen.
Should I Grow Carrots in My Garden?
Yes. You should grow carrots in your garden. It is hard to find a more useful vegetable in the garden than a carrot (though onions and potatoes will put up a good fight for the title). Carrots are easy if you plant them in good loose soil with enough spacing, so it’s something you’re really going to want to do if you can. In extremely hot climates carrots are a good winter or fall crop, and in cooler climates they make good crops for spring into early summer. For us at least these are a must grow vegetable.