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 I love growing carrots! There's nothing like harvesting your own prized beauty straight out of the ground and as always, you can’t beat the taste and goodness of the ones you grow yourself. What's more, once you’ve got a crop in the ground, you’ll be harvesting fresh juicy carrots for months.
Autumn’s a great time to plant carrots just by sowing seed directly in the ground. It’s easy to do to. Here’s how to go about it.
First up, find a sunny spot and prepare the soil well. Carrots like a deep, friable, soil so dig it over until it’s quite fluffy and friable. If you see any rocks or pebbles, get rid of them because they can make your carrots fork.
Mound the soil to improve drainage and increase the growing depth. Work the surface of the soil with a steel rake, level it out then make furrows about 1 cm deep and 15cm apart. Now you’re ready to plant your seed.
Carrot seed is quite fine, so it's hard to sow evenly and often clumps together. A good way to overcome this is to mix some seed in a jar of very dry sand. Then put a hole in the lid of the jar, and pour the sand and seed mix along the the furrows. You don't need to cover it with any additional soil. Just water it all in gently with a watering can and you're done.
It’s important you keep the soil moist until the seeds germinate. A great way to do this is to cover them with a piece of moist hessian. Just remember to take it off when the green shoots appear.
When the plants get to around 10cm’s high, thin them out leaving a space of around 5cm. The most important thing to do then is keep the soil evenly moist. That’ll guarantee a sweet juicy harvest.
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