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#1
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Small Carrot/Radish Box.
Hi,
I'm thinking about building a small raised garden area about (2' W x 3' L x 12" D) just for carrots and radishes within my larger garden. I get a good crop of carrots/radishes every year but they are tuff to extract from the sandy soil. If I fill up the bottom-less box with some good soil mixture then the carrots should be easier to pick and may grow better. Anyone see a problem with this? With such a small box will it dry out to quickly? Will I get pencil-like carrots if the soil if too loose? I may make it larger and plant my onions in it too. Any thoughts? Cheers, Jim |
#2
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Small Carrot/Radish Box.
Play4aBuck wrote:
Hi, I'm thinking about building a small raised garden area about (2' W x 3' L x 12" D) just for carrots and radishes within my larger garden. I get a good crop of carrots/radishes every year but they are tuff to extract from the sandy soil. If I fill up the bottom-less box with some good soil mixture then the carrots should be easier to pick and may grow better. Anyone see a problem with this? With such a small box will it dry out to quickly? Will I get pencil-like carrots if the soil if too loose? I may make it larger and plant my onions in it too. Any thoughts? Cheers, Jim It's not necessary to build a raised bed for carrots and/or radishes. Carrots will grow in fairly tight soil, although it's best if it isn't really compacted. (Of course for things you have to bend over to harvest, the raised bed has some advantages). (You could do the same thing by building trenches for the walkways.) I grow a lot of carrots, and to harvest a few I just use a shovel. Place the shovel about 6" away from the row of carrots with the blade straight up and down, parallel to the (presumed) direction of the carrot. Just step on the shovel to drive it in, hold onto the handle and lean back. This will loosen the soil on one side of the carrot. That's enough to get the carrot out easily. If you put the blade in at an angle you risk cutting off the carrot. The same thing applies to radishes (I am assuming you are growing the long thin radishes or Daikons rather than the round style). In addition, I recommend that you grow more carrots than you think you will need. The carrots will withstand the early frosts in the fall without any problem. When you rake up your leaves, bury the carrots to a depth of 2 or 3 feet. Place a shovel at each end of the row so that when the winter snows come you can find them. The leaves will keep the ground from freezing and you can dig carrots all winter. Just move the leaves away and dig, then put the leaves back over the exposed end of the row. Fresh carrots in January are worth a few minutes of cold hands. After about March, when the weather starts to warm up again, the carrots will start to grow again. At this point they are using the sugars they stored in the root, so they lose their sweetness and aren't worth digging any more. If allowed to keep growing they will go to seed. So about the beginning of March, dig up all the remaining carrots, clean them and place them in plastic bags in the refrigerator. They will keep there fairly well for a month. Fresh carrots in the winter make good gifts. I do this in New England, about zone 5. The ground freezes to a depth of 1-3 feet in the winter, but not where I cover the carrots. For two of us I cover about 50 feet of carrots. I estimate we eat the carrots from about 20 feet of that row, but as noted above, they make good gifts. South of here you may not need quite as much cover for the carrots, and you may have to dig them all earlier in the season. |
#3
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Small Carrot/Radish Box.
PS: I've heard about keeping carrots in wet sand in a cold area. I tried
it, and in my opinion, keeping them in the ground works better (although it's possible my storage wasn't cold enough). The carrots don't get limp and they retain their cold weather sweetness until spring. It's also a lot less work in the fall when you're busy. It provides you with a place to keep your leaves for the winter. The only downside is that you have to move the leaves in the spring to make way for next year's crops. |
#4
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Small Carrot/Radish Box.
PS: I've heard about keeping carrots in wet sand in a cold area. I tried
it, and in my opinion, keeping them in the ground works better (although it's possible my storage wasn't cold enough). The carrots don't get limp and they retain their cold weather sweetness until spring. It's also a lot less work in the fall when you're busy. It provides you with a place to keep your leaves for the winter. The only downside is that you have to move the leaves in the spring to make way for next year's crops. |
#5
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Small Carrot/Radish Box.
PS: I've heard about keeping carrots in wet sand in a cold area. I tried
it, and in my opinion, keeping them in the ground works better (although it's possible my storage wasn't cold enough). The carrots don't get limp and they retain their cold weather sweetness until spring. It's also a lot less work in the fall when you're busy. It provides you with a place to keep your leaves for the winter. The only downside is that you have to move the leaves in the spring to make way for next year's crops. |
#6
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Small Carrot/Radish Box.
"Play4aBuck" wrote in message
... Hi, I'm thinking about building a small raised garden area about (2' W x 3' L x 12" D) just for carrots and radishes within my larger garden. I get a good crop of carrots/radishes every year but they are tuff to extract from the sandy soil. If I fill up the bottom-less box with some good soil mixture then the carrots should be easier to pick and may grow better. Anyone see a problem with this? With such a small box will it dry out to quickly? Will I get pencil-like carrots if the soil if too loose? I may make it larger and plant my onions in it too. Any thoughts? Cheers, Jim In Anchorage, Alaska I used to grow carrots and radishes in large black nursery pots on my deck, my property being mainly an ancient rocky riverbed that would require explosives to till. The pots were the cheap disposable sort, perhaps 24" across and 16" high. I had pretty decent results with my crops although I tended to pick the carrots pretty early in their growth when they weren't much more than finger-sized (perfect for a light steaming). There wasn't a lot of trouble with the pots drying out although if the rains didn't come for a few days I tried to water them occasionally. BTW, the soil used was common bagged planting mix. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] http://johnmcgaw.com |
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