The Carrot Experiments III

Constant readers will of course remember how my tiny carrots led me to try an experiment involving boring holes in a tub of sand with a drainpipe in order to produce something worthwhile and met with mixed results a couple of months in.

A couple of months on and there's been a bit more progress. I came back after my month away from the garden to a bit of a shock.

AHHH!

Ten minutes careful work with a trowel allowed me to peel off the top level of dirt and sand to reveal that the moss, weeds and mould were not a deep-set problem.

Hi! Barry Scott here, asking whether you've got problems with limescale, rust, ground-in dirt.

However ten minutes after that, the rain came down and washed the sand and soil together again, so I'll probably be cultivating some more mould shortly.

The carrots are growing some very impressive leaves, although so far there's only very slender roots underneath. One trick which I've learned this year is that it's possible to see what you're getting with carrots without pulling them up. If you scrape away the soil at the base of the leaves, you can expose the top of the root and see how thick the actual carrot is without doing any damage to it. The biggest ones on the right of the picture currently have roots that are no wider than my little finger, so they're barely broader than the green bits. Given how much effort this whole sand and drainpipe business has been, it's not really giving a good return on investment.

However, it's doing better than my other carrot-related experiment that I mentioned last time - that of growing them in a bed rather than in containers. The theory was that I've found a lot of vegetables grow better in the open dirt than in pots and I wanted to see if it held true for carrots:

Sadly, this is the after shot. The bit of plastic fencing is intentional, btw, rather than just being tramp chic. It's there in a vain attempt to keep cats from using it as a bathroom, although I should really have let them go at it. That way at least somebody would've done something productive with the land.

Apparently not. It could be because the dirt was cold; the seeds were planted late and a big bed takes longer to warm up of a morning than a plastic pot. Or it could be the universe's sign that I should give up with carrots altogether.

Carrots are currently circling the drain as far as growing them next year is concerned. They're cheap to buy and have been a pain in the arse for very small yields this year. I guess I'll see whether I get anything from the multitude of little seedlings that've come up from my frantic plantings at the end of August, and try to take comfort in the one small fillip that I got last week:

Check it out - it's a purple goddamn carrot! Woo!

That was from an ordinary pot, done with my usual method. So much for experiments.

PJW