Friday 30 December 2011
Carrots are always a great crop up here in Galena. As with some of the other more productive veggies, though, I've grown many varieties and done a poor job recording what worked and what did not. Another problem with this vegetable is the constant War With The Chickweed, which manages as always to grow in the tiny spaces between the growing carrots and makes weeding an exercise in fingertip exhaustion.
A lush selection of Nelson carrots. September 2008.
Summer 2011
What a bomb this year. I tried to create those cool little seed strips and then plant those strips between the row dividers. What happened instead what that most of the seed strips didn't germinate, causing me to punt at the end of June and quickly plant up the rest of my Mokums and Nelsons. Well, we got a few trays of carrots, and I remembered to thin this year, but the crop was a bummer.
Summer 2010
The carrots were grown for much of the season along with the beans in the hot frame. Growth was fabulous, sadly balanced by the lack of thinning. In the upcoming season, there are two things I'll do to solve these problems.
• The toilet paper homemade seed strip. First introduced by Galena gardener Sandy - who is far and away the most brilliant gardener in town. You unroll some toilet paper, place seeds spaced at regular intervals on the paper, fold and roll up, and then unroll into the soil at planting. Seeds come up already thinned! Sounds brilliant.
• The 2-by-4 solution. One writer wrote about putting down a 2-by-4 between each row of carrots. No weeds between the rows. Simple and brilliant. Around these parts, processed wood might be hard to come by - but straight sections of spruce, split in two, should do the trick.
So our carrots did all right - too many small ones, though. We'll fix this next year.
Previous seasons
As with many of the other plantings, I've run through many different varieties - purple carrots, red carrots, short carrots, big carrots. No documentation, though. Most varieties have worked well, too, with the exception of that persnickety thinning thing.