Tuesday, February 6, 2018

January carrots, or, The trouble with seasons

Needless to say, there's a bit of a learning curve to growing your own food. Particularly if you grew up in a place like Southern California where seasons are something that happens to other people, and then move somewhere like, say, Scotland or Wales where seasons make the difference between lounging outside with a picnic of fresh strawberries, green salad, and roasted summer squash, versus sitting in your house shivering and hoping you never see another rutabaga as long as you live.


This year, we did a lot of things really well. One of the things we didn't do so well was carrots.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu
waits dreaming
Last Spring, we grew a handful of carrots. Most of our vegetable seeds are 5-7 years old, given to us by a friend, so our germination rates were pretty poor. We tried 4-5 different varieties, and some of them didn't germinate at all. Others started off lively, but got devoured by slugs when we transplanted them out. Those that did manage to grow in our shallow soil tended to split and fork into Lovecraftian shapes.


Nevertheless, as summer was drawing to a close, having just read Charles Dowding's How to grow Winter Vegetables, we decided to plant a second crop of carrots for overwintering. Winters in our bit of South Wales tend to be mild, we figured, and root vegetables tend to be quite hardy.
 So, in late September, after our peas had pretty much died back and our spinach seemed to be nearing its end, I pulled out our little paper envelopes of carrot seeds and mixed up a bit of seed starting compost.

And then I managed to spill water on the table where the seed packets were sitting, soaking the envelopes so that there was no putting them back into storage again. Instead of sowing a handful of seeds, I ended up spreading all of them onto a tray of compost, figuring that only a fraction of them would germinate anyway.


Except that our conservatory is rather a lot warmer in September than it is in March, and in a few weeks, we ended up with a fairly dense mat of tiny carrot seedlings. About 150 of them.

Weeks passed. The carrot seedlings grew. As they got bigger, I pricked out some of them into small pots, but ran out of space for the pots long before the seed tray was empty. We managed to move a handful of carrots into the space where the potatoes had been, but we still had dozens in the conservatory. By November, our remaining maincrop veggies showed no sign of dying back (I did say our winters here are mild), leaving us without a place to plant the carrots.

Our plan had always been to keep our messy, fleece-covered vegetables in the back yard and use our front yard for a (comparatively) neat and tidy herb garden. But the weather was getting coler and the days were getting shorter. In December, we transplanted another dozen or so carrots into the front yard under the shelter of some plastic soda bottles. They're a bit of an eyesore, but they're surviving, and if the neighbor's have complained, they haven't done it within earshot.

Then, we ended up with an infestation of aphids in our conservatory, and the remaining indoor seedlings started to wilt and die. I sprayed them occasionally with a mixture of copper soap and neem oil, but what seemed to work best was just putting the pots outdoors on warmer days so the wind, rain, and birds could get at the bugs. At the beginning of January, we still had a couple or three dozen seedlings in our conservatory, some quite hearty and happily forming stout orange taproots in 3 inches of soil, some frail wispy things clinging tenuously to life.


What our entire conservatory looked
like last spring. No room
for leftover carrots!
By mid-January, planning the new season's garden was well underway. In a few more weeks, it would be time to start sowing seeds again, and the carrots were occupying valuable real estate. Much to our amazement, our back garden is still full of surprisingly lively chard, kale, celery, radishes, and beets (and a handful of carrots), meaning that we still don't have any place to put the carrots.

Around this time of year, our conservatory stays only a few degrees warmer than outdoors, so we decided that the carrots would sink or swim. Outside, at least, the aphids would be less of a problem since birds and the wind and cold can get to them. Which is why I spent the 28th of January transplanting those last couple of dozen carrot seedlings into the awful clay-and-gravel soil of our front herb garden.


I gave them some more-or-less finished compost from the back yarden, and mulched them with some chopped up bramble trimmings. One week and a few light frosts later, the smallest ones have disappeared (not surprisingly), but the larger ones are holding up tolerably well. Of the original ~150 seeds that germinated, we've probably managed to save less than 50. I'll keep feeding and mulching them as I can collect more stuff to chop up into bits, and hopefully they'll be ready to eat by the time I need to plant out basil and cilantro in the summer.

A few of the survivors after a week outdoors. (Those in bottles
have been out since November.)
For what it's worth, the new carrot seeds that we ordered for this year are a variety called Eskimo F1, which is supposed to be hardy down to -10° C. You live and learn, right?

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