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Have you ever wanted to grow sweet, crunchy carrots right from your own garden? In this video, you'll learn everything you need to know about growing carrots from sowing to harvest. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced gardener, these step-by-step tips will help you grow straight, healthy, and flavorful carrots with confidence.
We'll cover how to prepare the soil, sow seeds correctly, water for the best growth, thin seedlings, prevent common problems, and know exactly when it's time to harvest. With the right techniques, you can enjoy an abundant crop of homegrown carrots all season long.
If you're looking to improve your vegetable garden and grow better carrots naturally, this guide has you covered from start to finish.
🌱 If you enjoyed this video, please LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and turn on notifications for more gardening tips, growing guides, and organic gardening advice every week!
#Carrots #Gardening #GrowCarrots #VegetableGarden #OrganicGardening #GardenTips #HomeGarden #GrowYourOwnFood #Harvest #GardeningForBeginners
Have you ever wanted to grow sweet, crunchy carrots right from your own garden? In this video, you'll learn everything you need to know about growing carrots from sowing to harvest. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced gardener, these step-by-step tips will help you grow straight, healthy, and flavorful carrots with confidence.
We'll cover how to prepare the soil, sow seeds correctly, water for the best growth, thin seedlings, prevent common problems, and know exactly when it's time to harvest. With the right techniques, you can enjoy an abundant crop of homegrown carrots all season long.
If you're looking to improve your vegetable garden and grow better carrots naturally, this guide has you covered from start to finish.
🌱 If you enjoyed this video, please LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, and turn on notifications for more gardening tips, growing guides, and organic gardening advice every week!
#Carrots #Gardening #GrowCarrots #VegetableGarden #OrganicGardening #GardenTips #HomeGarden #GrowYourOwnFood #Harvest #GardeningForBeginners
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00The carrot has a reputation for being a tricky, temperamental thing to grow,
00:04and folks will tell you that you either have the knack for it, or you do not.
00:09I am here to tell you that is nonsense.
00:12There is no knack.
00:14There are only a few plain things a carrot needs,
00:18and if you give it those things, it will grow for you as sure as anything in the garden.
00:23And if you do not, it will disappoint you, no matter how green your thumb.
00:29The whole difference between a fine crop of long, sweet carrots
00:33and a patch of stunted, forked little stubs
00:36comes down to understanding what a carrot is and what it is asking of you.
00:42So let me walk you through the whole of it today,
00:45from the sowing of the seed, clear to the pulling of the crop, and leave nothing out.
00:51My name is Elias Yoder, and I farm here in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania.
00:57And a carrot is one of the most rewarding things you can grow,
01:02for it stores beautifully through the whole winter in a cool cellar,
01:07and a homegrown carrot, pulled fresh and sweet out of your own ground,
01:12tastes so far above the woody things in the store
01:16that they hardly seem the same vegetable.
01:19I remember pulling carrots with my grandmother as a small boy on a cool fall evening,
01:25and her handing me one straight from the ground, brushed off on her apron,
01:31still cold from the earth, to eat right there in the row.
01:34I have eaten a great many fine things in my life.
01:38I am not sure any of them ever bettered that.
01:42She grew them in a long raised bed she kept as loose and free of stone as a sifted flour
01:49bin,
01:50and she used to say,
01:51a carrot will forgive you almost anything except a hard road and a dry cradle,
01:58meaning the deep loose soil to grow down through,
02:02and the damp seed bed while it sprouts.
02:05Get those two right, she said, and the rest is easy.
02:09I have found it true every year since.
02:13Before I go on, I will say this once and then leave it be.
02:17I gathered the whole of it, all these old ways of growing your own food, into a book.
02:24You can find it at EliasYoder.com.
02:29The book is the long version.
02:31If you want it, it is there.
02:33I will not mention it again.
02:36Now everything, and I mean everything, with a carrot, begins with the soil.
02:43Get the soil right, and you are most of the way home.
02:47Get it wrong, and nothing you do after will save you.
02:52So we start there, and we start before we ever open a seed packet.
02:58Here is what a carrot wants, and here is why.
03:02A carrot is a root that must grow down, long and straight and deep,
03:09pushing its way down through the ground as it swells.
03:12So the ground it grows in must be loose and deep and, above all, free of stones.
03:20Think about what happens when that growing root pushes down and strikes a stone,
03:26or a hard clod, or a lump of half-rotted matter.
03:31It cannot go through it.
03:33So it forks around it, or it kinks, or it splits and grows two legs, or it goes stunted and
03:41stubby.
03:42Every one of those sad, forked carrots you have ever pulled was a carrot that hit something hard on its
03:50way down.
03:51So your whole job, before you plant, is to give that root a clear, soft, deep road to travel.
04:00Dig your bed over deep, a good foot down at the least, and as you dig, work through it with
04:08your hands and your fork,
04:10and pick out every stone you find, every root, every hard clod,
04:16and break the soil up fine and loose and crumbly all the way down.
04:21If your ground is heavy clay, or rocky, or shallow, then do not fight it.
04:29Build up instead.
04:31Make a raised bed, or grow your carrots in a deep container or a grow bag,
04:37where you can fill it with loose, light soil of your own making,
04:41and give the carrot the deep, soft road it wants.
04:45I have grown some of my finest, straightest carrots in a deep bag of loose soil for exactly this reason,
04:54where the ground itself was too stony to give a decent carrot.
04:59Now here is a thing you must know, and it runs against what you would think.
05:05Do not enrich your carrot bed with fresh manure.
05:10I know I am forever telling you to feed your ground with manure,
05:15but the carrot is the exception, and here is why.
05:19Fresh, strong manure makes a carrot fork and split and grow hairy with little side roots,
05:25chasing after the rich pockets in the soil.
05:28And too rich a ground altogether makes the carrot put all its strength into a great bushy top
05:34and leave you a poor, thin root below.
05:38A carrot wants a lean, loose soil, not a rich one.
05:42So if your bed needs feeding, do it with old, well-rotted compost worked in the season before.
05:49Nothing fresh and nothing strong.
05:52Lean and loose and deep and stone-free.
05:56That is the whole of what a carrot asks of its ground, and it is 90% of the battle.
06:02Now to the sowing, and here is where patience begins.
06:06A carrot seed is a tiny thing, near as fine as dust, and that makes it hard to sow thinly,
06:13and sowing too thick is one of the commonest mistakes there is.
06:18So here is an old trick to help you.
06:21Take your fine carrot seed and mix it with a good handful of dry sand before you sow.
06:27The sand carries the seed and spaces it out, and you can see the pale sand against the dark soil
06:34as you sow,
06:35so you sow far more evenly and thinly than you ever could with the bare seed.
06:40That one trick will save you a great deal of thinning later.
06:45Make a shallow little furrow, no more than half an inch deep, and sow your seed and sand thinly along
06:52it.
06:53Cover it over with just a bit of fine soil, press it down gently so the seed sits close against
06:59the earth,
07:00and water it in with a fine, gentle spray so as not to wash the tiny seeds away.
07:06If you are sowing more than one row, leave a good hand's width and more between the rows,
07:12enough to get in there and tend them.
07:15And now comes the hardest part of growing a carrot, which is not hard work at all, but hard patience.
07:21A carrot is slow to come up. Slow.
07:25It can take two weeks, sometimes three, to show its first thread of green, far longer than most things you
07:33sow.
07:33And in all that long stretch of waiting, there is one thing you must not fail at,
07:39and it is the single greatest cause of failure with carrots.
07:43You must not let that seed bed dry out. Not once.
07:47If the surface of that soil dries hard while the seed is trying to germinate down there in it,
07:53your carrots will not come, or they will come thin and patchy.
07:57The top of that soil must be kept damp, gently and constantly,
08:02through the whole two or three weeks of germination.
08:05Now that is a hard thing to do, keeping a bare seed bed damp for three weeks,
08:11especially in warm weather when the sun dries it fast.
08:14So here is the old way to make it easy.
08:17After you sow and water, lay a plain board, an old plank, flat right on top of the row.
08:24That board holds the moisture in the soil beneath it, so it cannot dry out, and it keeps the sun
08:30off.
08:31Then every day, or every couple of days, you lift the board and check underneath,
08:36and give it a light watering if it wants it, and lay the board back.
08:41And the very day you see the first tiny threads of green breaking the surface,
08:46you take that board off for good, and let them have the light.
08:50That board will do more to give you a good stand of carrots than any other single thing I can
08:55tell you,
08:56for it solves the one problem that ruins more carrot sowings than all others together.
09:02So your carrots are up, a fine row of little feathery green threads.
09:07Now comes the thinning, and folks hate to do it, but you must.
09:12If you leave them all crowded together, not one of them will have the room to swell into a proper
09:17carrot,
09:18and you will get a tangled mat of little roots and nothing worth pulling.
09:23So when the seedlings are an inch or two tall, you go along and thin them,
09:27pulling out the weakest and the crowded ones and leaving the strongest,
09:31so that each carrot that remains has a good couple of inches all around it to grow into.
09:36A little later, thin them once more if they still crowd,
09:40and this second thinning is a happy one,
09:43for those thinnings are baby carrots already, and lovely to eat.
09:48Now I must give you a careful word about the thinning,
09:51because there is a trouble tied to it.
09:53When you thin a carrot, you bruise and crush the leaves,
09:57and the carrot leaf, when crushed, throws off a strong smell.
10:01And there is a pest, the carrot fly, that hunts by exactly that smell from a good distance off.
10:08So a row of just thinned carrots, throwing off that scent,
10:13is like ringing a dinner bell for the carrot fly.
10:17So here is how you thin wisely.
10:20Thin in the evening, when the carrot fly is not about,
10:24rather than in the heat of the day.
10:27Thin gently, disturbing the leaves as little as you can.
10:31And most important, gather up every scrap of the thinnings and the crushed tops,
10:36and carry them well away from the garden.
10:39Do not leave them lying there, scenting the air.
10:42Then water the row after thinning,
10:45to settle the soil back around the roots you have left,
10:48and to wash the scent down.
10:50Mind those things, and you thin without calling in the very pest that most troubles a carrot.
10:58Now let me tell you about that carrot fly,
11:00for it is the one real enemy of the crop, and worth understanding.
11:05It is a small fly that lays its eggs at the base of your carrot plants,
11:10and its little grubs then tunnel down and bore through your carrots underground,
11:15riddling them with rusty tunnels, and ruining them for eating.
11:19You often never see the fly, nor know it was there,
11:24until you pull a fine-looking carrot and find it tunneled through and spoiled.
11:29But here is the wonderful thing about the carrot fly,
11:33the thing that lets you beat it easy.
11:35It flies low.
11:37It cannot or will not fly but a foot or two off the ground.
11:41It comes in low and level, hunting along the ground for that carrot smell.
11:46So all you need to do to defeat it is put up a barrier it cannot get over.
11:52You build a low fence around your carrot bed, two feet high, or a bit more,
11:57of any fine mesh or netting or light cloth the fly cannot pass through,
12:02run right around the bed.
12:04The fly comes in low, meets your barrier, and cannot climb nor fly over it,
12:10and so it never reaches your carrots at all.
12:13Or, you can lay a light cloth or fine netting right over the top of the bed,
12:18tucked down at the edges, so the fly cannot get down to the plants at all.
12:23Either way, you have simply shut the door on it.
12:26It is one of the most satisfying bits of pest-defeating there is,
12:30for it asks no poison, and it works near perfectly,
12:33once you understand that the fly flies low.
12:36And there is one more old way to muddle the carrot fly,
12:41and you have heard me speak of its like before.
12:44You plant strong-smelling things among your carrots,
12:47onions and leeks especially,
12:49whose sharp smell drowns out the carrot smell
12:52and confuses the fly so it cannot find its mark.
12:55A row of onions between your rows of carrots does double duty,
12:59a crop and a guard both.
13:01It is the same old wisdom, muddle the scent, and the pest is lost.
13:07Now, through the growing season, the carrot asks little of you,
13:11but the one thing it does ask is steady, even watering.
13:15And this matters more than folks think.
13:18If you let a carrot bed go dry, bone dry, and then soak it heavy,
13:23the carrots respond to that sudden flood of water
13:26by swelling so fast that they split and crack right open.
13:31Feast and famine watering splits your carrots.
13:34So water them steady and even, keeping the soil evenly moist,
13:39never letting it swing from dust to swamp and back.
13:43And a good mulch laid along the rows,
13:45once the plants are up and growing well,
13:48helps you hold that moisture even and steady,
13:51and keeps the weeds down besides,
13:53for weeds will crowd and starve a carrot quick.
13:57Only when you mulch a carrot,
13:59take care to draw the mulch up over the shoulders of the roots as they swell,
14:03for a carrot shoulder that pokes up into the light and sun
14:06will turn green and go bitter there,
14:09the same as a potato does.
14:11Keep the shoulders covered.
14:13And that is near the hole of the tending.
14:16Loose, deep, stone-free, lean soil to start.
14:19Sow thin with the sand trick.
14:22Keep the seedbed damp under a board till they come.
14:26Thin wisely in the evening and clear the tops away.
14:30Guard against the low-flying carrot fly with a barrier or a companion of onions.
14:35Water steady and even,
14:37and mulch to hold it so, keeping the shoulders covered.
14:41Do those things,
14:43and your carrots will grow long and straight and sweet
14:46with hardly another thought from you.
14:49Now the harvest.
14:50The best part.
14:52You can begin pulling carrots as soon as they are big enough to be worth eating,
14:56taking the biggest first and leaving the rest to grow on.
15:00And here is the right way to pull one,
15:02for a carrot pulled wrong will snap off and leave half itself in the ground.
15:08Do not just grab the top and haul,
15:11especially in firm ground,
15:12for the top will tear off and the root will stay behind.
15:17Instead, take hold low,
15:19right at the base of the leaves,
15:20and first push down and give a little twist
15:23to loosen the root in its socket,
15:25and then draw it up steady.
15:27If the ground is firm or dry,
15:30water it well an hour before,
15:32or loosen alongside the row with a fork,
15:35easing the soil without spearing the carrots,
15:38and then they will draw right up, whole and clean.
15:41Now a fine thing about carrots,
15:43is that they are in no hurry once grown.
15:46They will sit happily in the ground long after they are ready,
15:50keeping fresh right there in the cool soil,
15:52so you need not dig them all at once.
15:55You can leave them and pull them as you want them,
15:58clear into the winter.
15:59In fact, a light frost or two makes a carrot sweeter,
16:03for the cold turns its starch to sugar.
16:06Only before the ground freezes hard and solid,
16:10you will want to either dig the rest and store them,
16:12or heap a deep blanket of straw or leaves over the row
16:16to keep the ground from freezing hard,
16:18so you can keep pulling fresh carrots
16:20from under that blanket most of the winter.
16:23And the ones you dig to store,
16:25you twist off the green tops,
16:27brush off the soil but do not wash them,
16:30and pack them in boxes of dry sand or sawdust
16:33in a cool cellar,
16:34where they will keep firm and sweet for months.
16:37Let me say a plain word about
16:39who profits from you not knowing all this,
16:42and it is no dark scheme.
16:44A carrot is about the cheapest thing there is to grow.
16:47A packet of seed costs a few pennies
16:50and gives you hundreds of carrots.
16:52There is no product in it,
16:54no bottle,
16:55no special soil,
16:56nothing to sell you but that cheap packet of seed.
16:59And so nobody has any reason to teach you
17:01to grow a good one.
17:03The store would far rather sell you
17:05the woody bagged carrots week after week
17:07all your life
17:08than teach you that a strip of loose,
17:11stone-free ground
17:12and a board and a bit of patience
17:14would give you better ones for near nothing.
17:17It is not hidden.
17:18It is only never taught
17:20because the teaching profits no one but you.
17:23The money runs toward the store
17:25and away from the seed packet,
17:26and it always has.
17:28So there is the whole of it,
17:30from seed to cellar.
17:32Give your carrots a deep, loose,
17:35stone-free, lean soil
17:37and build up a bed or a bag
17:39if your ground is poor.
17:41Sow thin with the sand trick
17:43and keep the bed damp under a board
17:45until the slow seed comes up.
17:47Thin them wisely in the evening
17:49and carry the tops away.
17:51Guard them from the low carrot fly
17:53with a barrier and a few onions.
17:56Water them steady so they do not split
17:58and mulch to hold it
18:00and to keep their shoulders covered.
18:02Then pull them by loosening first
18:04and drawing steady,
18:06sweeten them with a frost
18:07and store them in sand for the winter.
18:10Do those things
18:11and you will pull carrots
18:13so long and sweet and fine
18:15you will wonder you ever bought one.
18:18Tell me down in the comments
18:19what county you garden in
18:21and whether the carrot
18:22has given you trouble before,
18:24forked ones or split ones
18:25or a row that never came up.
18:28For now, I think you may know exactly why.
18:31And if your own family
18:32had a way with carrots
18:33I have not spoken of,
18:34a way of storing them
18:36or a variety they always grew,
18:38put it down there
18:39for I am always glad
18:40to learn the old ways
18:42folks still keep.
18:43Next time out here
18:43I want to show you
18:44how to build a proper compost pile
18:46the old way,
18:47layer upon layer,
18:49so that you make your own
18:50black crumbly gold.
18:52The well-rotted old compost
18:54that is exactly what a carrot bed wants.
18:57Nothing fresh
18:58and nothing strong.
19:00It is the foundation
19:01under all of this
19:02and it is past time
19:03I showed you.
19:04But for now,
19:05remember this.
19:06The carrot is not temperamental
19:09and it plays no favorites.
19:11It only asks for a deep,
19:13soft road to grow down,
19:15a steady drink,
19:17and a little patience
19:18while it takes its slow time
19:19coming up.
19:20Give it those
19:21and it will feed you
19:23all winter long.
19:24The people who built this country
19:26with their hands knew that
19:28and we are only just starting
19:30to remember it.
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