Kem Ormond’s vegetable garden: How to grow carrots

Well-organised gardeners can be rewarded with carrots almost all year round. Photo / Rodrigo dos Reis / Unsplash

Kem Ormond is a features writer for NZME community newspapers and The Country. She’s also a keen gardener. This week, she’s talking about the versatile vegetable called the carrot.

OPINION

After onions and tomatoes, carrots would have to be the next most versatile vegetable.

Whether added to a salad, a casserole, made into a cake or simply glazed with some brown sugar, these vegetables are well worth their weight in gold.

If you are well organised, several successive plantings will see you with carrots almost all year round.

They like to be planted from seed straight into the ground, they loath being planted from seedlings.

If sowing in rows, make sure each row is 40-50cm apart and only sow 6mm deep.

Don’t be tempted to plant them too deeply otherwise those little seeds will never find the light.

I prefer to sow in blocks not rows as this helps keep the weeds from having too much room to take over.

Crops grown in late autumn will survive the winter but one thing you will need to be aware of is that they can be prone to bolting in early spring.

March is probably the latest that I plant as the season gets colder, they take longer to germinate, and this is also the time the slugs and snails are on the lookout for more food, and carrots tend to be a favourite.

Your soil always needs to be well dug to avoid them from forking - in other words going in strange directions.

Also, soil with elevated levels of nitrogen will cause lots of greenery and not much carrot!

So, make sure you have a fine tilth as the carrot seed is very small.

I always make sure I mark the sides of my carrot bed and when planted, I often cover it with a cloth to avoid any disturbance from birds and cats.

I sometimes leave the carrots under a netting cloche to avoid any rust fly which is a common pest.

You can also avoid rust fly by growing carrots in raised beds as they can only fly to a maximum height of around 45cm- crop rotation is also another option.

After four weeks, when carrots start showing their first true leaves, you may find you need to thin them out, not an enjoyable job I know but it is worth the effort and will enable good-sized, even roots to develop.

As they grow, gently cover the tops with soil as this will prevent them from going green.

Most varieties are ready to harvest when the top of the carrots emerge from the soil and are the size you want them to be.

The varieties I usually plant are Manchester, Majestic and Nantes but why not try out some of the heirloom varieties, and a rainbow mix of assorted colours is fun!

Carrots get their bright orange colour from beta-carotene, which converts to vitamin A once eaten.

They are also rich in antioxidants and fibre, making them healthy as well as tasty and I find that added to casseroles and even fritters, they seem to add sweetness.