Carrots are a rather finicky vegetable that can respond to unaccounted nuances in the growing process with a strange-looking harvest and a disappointingly low harvest. Caring for carrots in open ground implies a strict sequence at each point of successive stages of root development, and missing one of the points means jeopardizing all the work expended. How to care for carrots correctly?
What should a carrot bed look like?
How to grow carrots correctly? High yields begin with preparing the soil for planting, and initial preparations need to be made in the fall. A flat place is selected in the garden bed, sufficiently illuminated by the sun during daylight hours and, preferably, previously used for planting cucumbers, white cabbage or grain crops. Depending on what kind of soil carrots like, namely neutral or slightly acidic, the alkaline balance of the soil is regulated.
First, you need to assess whether the soil is suitable for carrots for this indicator. The easiest way is to collect a pinch of soil from the desired area on a piece of clean glass and pour it with table vinegar. Alkaline and slightly acidic environments will react with strong or moderate foam (as when extinguishing soda), while an acidic environment will not show any changes.
You can also pay attention to the area being clogged with grass:
- neutral soils are rich in lush, long vegetation: stinging nettle, quinoa, clover;
- acidic soils, where it is impossible to grow sweet carrots, will abound in mint, horsetail, violet and buttercup;
- on soil with weak acidity you will find burdock, alfalfa, small chamomile and thistle;
- alkaline environment, the poorest and just as unsuitable for growing carrots in open ground as acidic, it is characterized by: poppy, sweet clover, bindweed.
The second task in the question of how to grow a good carrot crop is to create conditions for saturating the soil with oxygen. This is required so that the carrots have a sweet taste and grow slenderly in length, and do not go horned and squirm in all directions, bumping into the hardness of unloosened earth.Gnarled carrots occur when the vegetable begins to send out branches in search of a convenient direction and softer soil, and not sweet ones - due to lack of air.
Light fluffy soil that is not clogged with clay can be worked with a garden rake, but hard, compacted layers must be completely broken up by deep digging.
How to plant carrots correctly
How to grow carrots in even rows and evenly distributed along the furrow? In order to get a good harvest, vegetables should not sit tightly together, which means there should be a distance between the seeds that is convenient for thinning later. There are many such convenient methods in agricultural technology:
- with a mixture of flour and water, the seeds are glued to a strip of paper towel or napkin at a distance of 2-3 cm from each other, then these tapes are placed directly into the grooves after pre-planting watering;
- combine the contents of a bag of seeds with 1 glass of clean sand, mix everything and introduce this mass in a thin stream into the dug groove;
- boil two tablespoons of starch in a liter of water and pour this lukewarm substance, with seeds added to it, into the prepared grooves;
- Most gardeners, when planting this crop, traditionally plant the seeds in the soil at a distance of about 4 cm and a gap between rows of 15 cm.
What to do immediately after landing? The bed is covered with polyethylene, which is held until the first shoots appear. The vegetable tolerates low temperatures and even soil frosts quite tolerantly, but prolonged cold is the reason why carrots go to the shoot to the detriment of root development.
Watering carrots
Carrots in open ground do not require as much regular as even watering - the plant does not care how often the soil is moistened, but the moisture level must be constant and unchanged. Deviation from the level of water saturation in the soil that is comfortable for the root crop leads to pathologies of root formation:
- superficial and slight moisture of the soil leads to the formation of a woody rhizome - the pale core of such a vegetable tastes bitter, and the carrot itself sometimes grows into bulky, shapeless tangles;
- When growing carrots, it is also dangerous to oversaturate the soil with watering - there is a risk of getting nondescript, twisted monsters with branchy tops.
One of the signs of improper and uneven watering is a horned carrot that has two or more root forks. To avoid mistakes of this kind, it is better to water root crops, adhering to the approximate scheme:
- When the first shoots appear, 7-8 waterings are carried out throughout the month, 6 liters of water per 1 m2 plot;
- in the first month of summer the norm increases to 11-12 liters, multiplied by 5-6 waterings;
- in July there should be only about five waterings, but 13-15 liters per meter of area;
- the onset of August entails a reduction in water consumption and labor costs - carrots are growing already on two waterings of 6 liters of water each.
14-20 days before the day scheduled for harvesting, watering is stopped. Then the soil is moistened once to make the digging process easier.
Weeding and thinning carrots
Growing carrots in open ground should be accompanied by repeated weeding, especially in the period before germination, when weeds with powerful rhizomes may not allow the vegetable crop to sprout.Weeds should not be allowed to grow too tall - late weeding is one of the reasons why gardeners subsequently miss out on useful crops, because along with the grass, young tops of the ungrown vegetable also end up in the general heap.
How to get high yields with regular weeding? There are two theories equally substantiated by the experience of gardeners on how to weed vegetables:
- after watering or rain - thus, the weeds are easily pulled out with the entire root system;
- before watering, when the ground is dry, the thin roots of the grass in this case remain in the soil and dry out, which prevents the germination of new weeds.
Another mandatory procedure, without which growing and caring for this crop in open ground is impossible, is proper thinning of plants in the garden. When seeds are initially planted at the same distance from each other of 2-3 cm, thinning is a rather corrective procedure and not always mandatory. Continuous sowing by any of the methods, when the seeds went into the furrow chaotically, in the long term always means one or two stages of breaking through the excess growth. Should I do this? Necessarily. The first thinning is carried out immediately, as soon as individual bushes of tops can be distinguished from the hatching greenery.
Often the answer to the question: why do carrots grow ugly lies precisely in the wrong actions when removing excess sprouts.
There are certain secrets on how to correctly perform this simple operation.
What to do and in what order to perform the actions:
- before thinning, the beds need to be watered generously from a garden watering can;
- The sprout should not be pulled, but pulled straight up from the ground, without swinging it;
- it is necessary that there is a distance of 3 or 4 cm between the preserved bushes;
- Immediately after the procedure, the garden is watered with warm water.
At the same stage, it is customary to carry out the first hilling of carrots and the first loosening between the rows. And, if the second part of the algorithm does not raise any big questions, there is a lot of controversy about the first.
So – do you need to hill carrots?
Spud up correctly
You can often hear even from experienced gardeners that carrots are not hilled. However, if you are not too lazy to do this painstaking work at least three times during the development of the vegetable, you can protect the future harvest from three misfortunes at once:
- from damage to the exposed part of the root by a carrot fly, which likes to lay eggs at the base of the vegetable;
- from the protrusion of greenery at the top of the rhizome;
- from exposure to direct sunlight, which leaves burns on the root surface of the tops.
Since it is recommended to hill up the root crop three times, the procedures are tied to certain phases: on the 5th, 7th and 10th released leaf.
Mulching a vegetable
How to grow large carrots and at the same time eliminate the risk of drying out the soil, the danger of pest invasion, and also significantly reduce the amount of weeding and loosening? For this purpose, there is a technology for covering the soil with mulch, and the technique itself is called “mulching.”
How to mulch a carrot bed? The most common way to mulch a garden bed is to cover the space between the rows of planted vegetables with hay, straw chaff or sawdust.The latter option is preferable, since covering with sawdust retains moisture longer and provides a more reliable shield against the invasion of cabbage grass and other pests.
Covering the soil with sawdust has another important advantage over grass flooring - weeds do not grow through it, while dried grass itself may by default have mature and ready-to-germinate seeds that will grow when in contact with moisture. Small wood chips have the same properties, along with sawdust.
It is recommended to mulch carrots when the outer part of the plant reaches 14-16 cm, and the vegetable itself is about 7-8 cm in diameter at the widest part of the root. Is it possible to mulch late varieties of root crops? It is not only possible, but also necessary, since the shelter retains the temperature it receives from the sun during the day for a long time, and as a result, the root crops are juicy and not cracked.
On forums there are often complaints like the following: “I mulch vegetables according to all the rules, but the vegetables wither, the tops fall off, and the end result is a horned or otherwise ugly carrot that lacks sweetness.” An important condition before carrying out the procedure is drying the material. Whatever mulching is done, the covering should not rot and thus serve as a habitat for the proliferation of harmful microorganisms. And the secret of withering, falling tops is rotting of the root, to which oxygen does not reach through the dense crust of damp mulch. That's all the secrets of proper mulching.
Common mistakes
Let's name the most common mistakes gardeners make that answer the most common complaints about why carrots don't grow:
- the seeds were planted without prior soaking or in insufficiently heated soil (the norm is 7-9 0WITH);
- sowing is too deep or the furrow is formed incorrectly (it is necessary to deepen the groove by 2 cm, then tamp its bottom with the edge of the palm or the handle of a hoe);
- lack of watering before or after planting, or watering with cold water;
- abundant watering of the soil until the sprouts emerge from the soil (until the green brush of sprouted plants appears in the garden bed, you cannot water the garden);
- frequent watering with a small amount of water, in which the moisture does not penetrate deep enough;
Why do carrots grow poorly? Perhaps due to the lack of a feeding element throughout the development of the plant. In unrested or depleted soil, vegetables will be thin, pale, and covered with white hairs. A lack of potassium will immediately affect the density of the root - it will become woody, and the lack of phosphorus will affect the taste - the carrot will become tasteless or even sour.
