Success with Carrots & Beets

Just think of it... honey-glazed carrots & roasted beets with butter...mmmm. Home-grown beets are tender and sweet and growing carrots in your garden allows you to try the wonderfully sweet and juicy Nantes-type varieties that you never see in supermarkets. With a few tips, you can harvest these garden treats well into the autumn and winter.

Seeds of both of these root crops should be sown directly in the garden when the soil warms. Root crops do require a well-dug, deep soil that doesn't have any large obstructions like big stones, or a hard-pan layer.

Gardeners with heavy clay soils that have trouble growing carrots should consider double-digging their root vegetable beds. Double-digging is a very difficult exercise- it requires lifting away the topsoil, loosening the compacted subsoil, and then replacing the topsoil again to make a light, fluffy seed bed. If you can't double dig and your soil is very heavy and you still want carrots, try growing varieties like Danvers, Healthmaster or Royal Chantenay which will tolerate heavier soil.

Root crops do not require a large amount of fertilizer. In fact, if too much nitrogen is in the soil, it results in hairy carrots and beets with lots of foliage but small roots. Quite the opposite of what you want. Very well aged compost or low nitrogen fertilizers like mushroom manure can be spread over the bed lightly and dug in well.

Carrot seed are tiny and can be a bit difficult to sow without clumping. If you tend to sow too many seeds, try mixing the seed with sand to stretch your planting and save seed. Hand-held seeders can also be a big help and are usually less than $10.

Because carrot seed are so small, they should not be planted more than 1/4 inch deep and 1/2 an inch apart. Seed this close to the surface are very susceptible to drying out. To prevent drying, water the soil well after planting and then stretch floating row cover (also known as Reemay) or damp newspaper directly on the bed to act as a mulch. Remember to check for sprouting seeds everyday. As soon as you see them, the newspaper should be removed. Floating row cover can stay on all season and is a great method of preventing carrot rust fly damage.

When the carrots are about an inch tall, thin them. Fresh eating varieties like Mokum or Bolero need to be an inch apart and juicing carrots like Healthmaster or Danvers 2-3 inches apart. Instead of actually pulling the plants out to thin them, seedlings of root crops should be cut off at the soil-line, preferably with scissors, to prevent any trauma to neighbouring seedlings.

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