Growing carrots is not hard if you make sure the soil is well prepared.  Carrots growing in hard clay gumbo will be stunted and look funny.  Carrots grown in rich sandy loam are full of vitamins and taste better than store-bought carrots, which have traveled a long way since being picked.

Preparing the Soil

If you have prepared your garden well, you have tilled the soil down to a depth of six inches and worked three inches of compost into it.  Now make a hill that is 4-6 inches tall and about three inches wide. 

The hills help make sure the carrots drain and also that they have enough good soil to grow straight and tall.  Plant the seeds along the top of the hill in a furrow that is 1/2 inch deep. Cover, water in, and wait.

Carrot seeds are tiny and hard to handle.  You can now purchase the seed in biodegradable tape that already has the seeds at the correct spacing.  It is a little more expensive, but you may find it worth the money.  You can also purchase things that look like big syringes to dispense seeds.  I have never found those to work, but your experience may be different.

Before planting your carrots, work one cup of 10-10-10 into each 10-foot of row.  It is easiest to spread the fertilizer, then rake it in.  When the carrots emerge, wait until they are about 4 inches high then side dress the carrots with two tablespoons of the same fertilizer.  You can repeat when the carrots get to be 6-8 inches tall if they are pale instead of bright green.

When the carrot tops are 4 inches high, thin them to a spacing of 2 inches between carrots.  You can probably eat the ones you pull up.  As the carrots get bigger, thin to 4 inches apart.  If the carrots are crowded they will not grow well.

Keep the carrots weeded well or the weeds will take all the water and nutrients and the carrots will fail to thrive.  Carrots should be ready to eat 70-80 days from planting.  They should be 1 to 1.5 inches in diameter.  Any bigger and they will get tough.  Loosen the dirt around the carrots before pulling to make sure the root does not break off.

To store carrots, remove the tops and compost them.  Wash the carrots and store them in the bottom of the refrigerator.  They will store longer if you place them in a plastic bag to increase the humidity and store them in the coldest part of the refrigerator.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.