The MurrTudi Homestead

I’ve not attempted to grow carrots many times, but this year we grew amazing carrots. Here’s how, as best I can tell:

1. In the spring, tear up lawn, add compost and sand, rototill, rake soil into foot-high beds. (Now that we have established beds, this step will just become: add compost, fork into soil.)
2. Leave bed all spring and most of summer because you are busy doing other gardening. Weed occasionally, but mostly just neglect the bed. (I actually think this is very important, unintentional as it sounds, for reestablishing good soil structure after such thorough digging and raking of the bed. Carol Deppe, who writes The Resilient Gardener, claims that a good soaking after tilling the soil really helps rebuild soil structure by settling the soil particles together, but time and worms do the same thing. Planting a cover crop would also do the same thing, long as you pull it out by hand before you plant.)
3. In mid-late summer, weed the bed and very lightly fork-separate it. What does that mean? Take your digging fork, shove it into the ground every foot or half foot and lift up the chuck of soil that rests on it. Don’t bust up all the clods or rake the bed into a fine fluff. This seems counter-intuitive for growing nice big, straight carrots, but it worked.
4. Make inch-deep furrows in the soil, line with fluffy seed-start mix, and sow your seeds.
5. Mulch around the rows with straw, and try your best to keep the seed bed and young seedlings watered in the dry summer.
6. Thin early and often, then forget about your carrots (except to water fairly often) until “Holy crap these are effing huge!!!!”

My grandpa sent us the seeds for the purple carrots- they turned out incredibly well. Quite pretty and tasty. We roasted some last night with lemon juice and garlic and the color ran like beet juice.