Look I get it – you like carrots but you really don’t like carrots after you start planting them.
In my first year of doing garden installations I was so excited to go outside and help people install a garden they could harvest and hopefully learn how to grow and harvest their own food. In the business world of things it wasn’t the most thought out plan due to the fact that eventually my clientele won’t need me – but I don’t care about that.
One thing I always asked people was ‘what do you want to grow’ and then I was hit with a truck load of wants and needs and wow….we’re off running. I never considered that I can not ask that question any more. Due to many facts but one is that I was installing a garden and the ‘know how’ was left on me and yes I gave people this cute little printed/laminated hand off to learn quickly about their veggies and fruits but I was finding that many people did not read them – at all.
To experienced gardener carrots, beets, tomatoes, and so on always seem easy. But if you can remember growing your first carrot – it probably didn’t go so well and if it did you only grew it once that year.
Most cold weather crops IE lettuces, alliums(onions), salad green(mustards, beet family), and carrot family need a few things to happen for great success. One is succession and the other is thinning. There are many other factors but those come first in my book.
Now if you’re a root vegetable lover of carrots and beets you know the pains of thinning. Imagine you plant thousands of seeds and then in about 10 days you come back and have to ‘thin’ them out. It’s the polite term for killing or making room so to say for the others. Beets and carrots both need this process. So that’s your step 2, step one was planting in the first place.
Step 3 – this step happens 10 days after you plant. It’s call ‘succession’ growing. You see unlike planting a tomato seed whereby you get lots of tomatoes if you plant a carrot seed you only get one carrot and there is no multiplicity to that seed. In the long run one day well after we are gone we’ll have to consider plants and vegetation that is efficient and less time-intensive – carrots I feel won’t make that list.
So now do you still want carrots? Is it really worth it? Plant, thin, re-plant. Oh and hope you’re soil is good enough due to their sensitive nature of hitting most other forms and deforming in the soil and add to that timing – these are cold weather crops that once temps stay about 60-65 day and night begin to bolt(go to seed) or full on remain in a vegetative state. I’ve had beet seedlings grow throughout the summer and only until september they finally began to bulb out.
Yesterday I bought decent little bushel of carrots for $1 and was just discouraged for the farmer wishing he would never plant them. Just doing the math was discouraging for me and to think I paid a dollar – for someones efforts over 40 days a dollar!
I never tell people to plant carrots because it is not worth it. Just like lettuces. A small discussion came up at our house yesterday about lettuces and I feel the same way about lettuces as I do carrots. You need to have coordination, a bit of know how, and lots of lettuce to fill the shelves of your fridge and at the end of day are you really eating that many salads to want fresh lettuce every time? I will say that fresh lettuces last longer than store bought ones and if you’re planting kales – I recommend getting your hands on some asian flowering kale.
We’re coming out with a small book in the spring of 2016 about what people should be planting in their first garden to make it worth it. I have about a dozen books on gardening and in the back is an A-Z list of what you can grow. Awesome, great, and who is about to do all that? We need to show generations having a garden can be productive and life changing – and it’s not going to be with carrots. In my garden alone I grew over 60lbs of food and I have only 60 square feet of space and that is roughly 1lb/square foot. I feel accomplished and sure if you’re growing the big squashes you can smash that number due to overall density – I did it with tomatoes, beans, zucchini, and cucumbers. And we never recorded herbs because that’s just takes forever.
Stay tuned, stay in touch, and lets turn a generation around by telling them the truth.
Tell me your thoughts, confessions, and triumphs and trials…I want to know. I’d rather hear from someone who has failed as opposed to the success stories because often we learn our best from where we fail and we seem to only revel in success than learn from what we did right.
