Diary from the Pandemic Day 8 - Carrots and other roots

Another essential vegetable to have in the kitchen is the humble carrot so you may be considering growing some in your garden. If you take a completely dispassionate view of it, it probably isn't worthwhile growing carrots at home compared to buying them in the shops. Shop bought carrots are a good size, nice a straight, clean and cheap. In comparison, homegrown carrots a little tricky to grow, often are still small by the end of the season, can be all sorts of weird forked and knobbly shapes, come out of the ground covered in mud and probably cost more to grow than the same weight of shop bought ones.

Having said that, we grow carrots every year. But why? Well, they taste so much better than shop bought carrots (although my eldest daughter would disagree as she prefers the blandness of shop carrots). It is also possible to grow a whole variety of different shapes and colours to the usual ones you find in the supermarkets. And, probably most importantly, it is just satisfying to grow carrots.

Ideally carrots should be grown in light, free draining soil, where they can grow into nice, long, straight roots. In reality, you are unlikely to have this kind of soil in your garden. Certainly in MK, the soil is mostly heavy clay, with the occasionally flinty stone thrown in for good measure. If you try to grow carrots in soil like this, it will fork, twist and bend. In the summer, when the soil dries out, it will be too hard to pull the carrots out, and in the winter, when the soil is wet, it will be too muddy and sticky to harvest them.

So, what can be done? The simple answer is to grow carrots in containers. Being root vegetables, they need space for their roots to grow, although you can get round carrots or short root carrots that are particularly suitable for growing in containers. However, something the size of a bucket is perfectly fine for growing carrots, or even a window box type tub.  Fill your container with potting compost and you can mix in some sand too but this isn't essential. Scatter the seeds over the top and sprinkle a little more compost over that.

Slugs love carrots and sometimes you can think that carrots haven't germinated when in fact they germinated and then got munched by slugs before you even noticed. As such, I would recommend using slug pellets when you sow your carrots.

Another pest that likes to eat carrots is the carrot root fly. The adults can sniff out the smell of carrots and lay their eggs on the plants. Their maggoty grubs eat tracks through the surface of the carrot, pretty much ruining the whole thing. The only way to avoid damage like this is to use a very fine mesh to completely enclose the growing plants. However, this has the disadvantage of stopping you weeding them. Another way to avoid them is to grow them at a height over 2 feet tall because the female flies below this level.

Once carrots have germinated, you will need to "thin them out". The new seedlings will be growing too close together and if left they won't have space to develop into sensible sized roots, or they will grow in an twisted tangle, entwinned with each other. Good luck peeling those!

I recommend thinning them out in June when there will be tiny carrots worth eating as you go. Then repeat again a few weeks later. Eventually you will be left with decent sized carrots that you can harvest. They will sit in the ground all the way through the winter but by the following spring they will start to regrow and flower and will become inedible so you want to have harvested them all by then, regardless of their size.

When I sow carrots, I usually also sow a few parnsips in the same space. These have quite a slow and low germination rate so it is handy to grow them with the carrots so that any spaces in the patchy germination are filled with carrots and not empty space. Other than that, they grow pretty much like carrots, although they don't have issues with the carrot root fly and are fairly pest-free.

Another root vegetable well worth growing is beetroot. We grow these very successfully every year and they are a useful kitchen vegetable. We enjoy them in salads, roasted as a warm vegetable, grated raw in coleslaw and even pickled. They really don't seem to have any pest or problems, and as with carrots, they just need to be thinned out to give them space to grow. They can be harvested small in June and will sit happily in the soil all through the winter until about March time. We grow traditional purple ones, stripy pink ones and yellow ones too.