Want to grow carrots that your customers love the way Bugs Bunny loves his carrots? Keep reading and I am sure you will pick up some great tips and tricks of the trade.

We will be learning from a few experts in the market garden realm, including Pam Dawling (Sustainable Market Farming), J.M. Fortier (the market gardener), as well as Curtis Stone (The Urban Farmer).

Why Grow Carrots?

There are many advantages to growing carrots in your market farm, including:

• Thriving  in mild weather
• Storing well
• Providing high yields at harvest time
• They are popular
• Commanding a premium price if greens are left on

Varieties

Carrots come in several main types. The factors influencing your choice will be soil type, climate, market and harvest time, and method.

All carrots sweeten up when days are warm and nights are cool.

Nantes types are sweet, juicy, and tender. They contain few terpenoids, which is the volatile flavour compound we think of as “carroty”. When poorly grown, they can be watery and bland. 

J.M. Fortier grows Nantes almost exclusively because he believes they are the sweetest and tastiest carrot of all.

Imperator types are heavier and contain more terpenoids and fewer sugars and can be prone to bitterness if something goes wrong.

Many hybrid varieties are a cross between Nantes and Imperator types. Imperator types are best for storage.

Chantenay types have a flavour described as “parsley-like.” 

Kuroda types have a drier, creamier flavour.

Danvers 126 is a sturdy, open-pollinated variety suited to high production of bulk carrots.

Bolero is a hybrid storage type that looks a bit prettier and has a slightly better flavour than Danvers.

Chantenay Red Core is a blocky variety with a blunt tip. It resists splitting and can deal with clay.

The 56-day Nelson is a nice, slender Nantes variety with a blunt root, and sells well in the summer. It is tender and crisp with a deep orange colour and is somewhat brittle.

Oxheart is a large open-pollinated variety that is great for clay soils. They are available in purple, white, and red if you want to up your presentation game.

Rainbow, Mokum, and Purple Haze are also great for presentation at the farmer’s market as well, as well as for selling to chefs.

Crop Requirements

Any decent soil will grow carrots, but the best ones grow in deep, loose, and fertile sandy loams with good moisture-holding capacity.

Compost is a must, not manure, as adding manure before carrots could make them fork.

Compost not only increases the organic matter in the soil but also suppresses some diseases and nematodes (which can cause forked carrots).

Carrots like loose, well-aerated soil that’s been worked quite deeply with the broadfork.

This crop is not a heavy feeder, and fertilizing with compost once every two years seems to be enough to meet its needs. Carrots don’t appreciate high nitrogen fertilizer or excessive fresh manure, demonstrating this aversion by forming hairy roots.

However, supplementary fertilizer in the first seedings when the soil is still too cold to provide sufficient nitrogen for good leaf growth may be required.

Sowing

Sow carrots whenever the soil is between 50°F (10°C) and 95°F (35° C), so long as you can keep the surface damp. 

On Pam’s farm, they start carrots in February and sow every couple of weeks in spring. Their soils are not 50° F (10°C) in February, but the seed comes to no harm in the ground and it’s a job that can get done early.

They sow once a month in summer if they need more, and then finish with a big sowing at the end of July or early August, which is 10 to 12 weeks before the first frost. These get harvested in November. 

J.M’s approach is to have their first seeding planted in the hoophouse using a six-row seeder at a density of 12 rows per bed. They then use pelleted seeds to produce early baby carrots that sell like hotcakes at their first farmers market. 

Their second early seeding is done directly in the garden, but under the cover of a caterpillar tunnel and a row cover. At that point, they aim to grow bigger size carrots and space the seeding to five rows on the bed. From their observations, carrots need about 1 1/2 square inches to grow to a size of 6 to 7” which is what they aim for.

They time their final carrots seeding so that the crop can be harvested from the field right until their very last CSA shares in October. When the nights begin to get frosty they cover their last carrot beds with row covers, sometimes two.

Carrots store well in the ground as well as long as the temperature doesn’t sink below 20°F (-7°C). The cold nights actually make the carrots taste much sweeter, much to the delight of their CSA members. 

Curtis’s approach is to plant carrots five times per season. The first is under poly low tunnels or greenhouses the first week of April, then every month after that, with the last being an overwintered crop, seeded August 1st.

In his climate (Kelowna, BC) he can overwinter carrots and pull them from the ground all winter. The key is to keep the soil dry during the fall.

Winter carrots are fully mature before the first week of October, then they get covered with poly low tunnels and no longer get watered. If you can keep off the winter precipitation, then when the weather drops to freezing, your soil will not freeze.

This is critical to storing carrots in the ground. For this to work, you will also need to have soil with good drainage. If the carrot bed is in a low-lying area where the water settles, this will not work as carrots will rot as soon as the soil thaws or after a freeze. 

Weed Control

Carrots are ideal crops for pre-emergence flame weeding. The goal is to flame the bed the day before the expected emergence of the crop.

Use a soil thermometer to figure out which day to flame. For carrots, it’s possible to sow a few indicator beets at the end of one of the beds; as soon as you see the red loops of the beet seedlings breaking the surface, flame the carrots. Don’t forget to look for carrots too, just in case! Beets are always quicker than carrots in germinating.

You can use a handheld flamer attached to a propane cylinder that is in a wheelbarrow pushed by a second person behind the first. The second person also acts as a “Fire Warden.” Some growers mount the propane on a backpack frame.

Walking along the aisles between beds and wafting the wand diagonally back and forth across the bed takes about 10 minutes for a hundred-foot bed.

Flame weeding alone can reduce hand weeding to 1 hour per 100 feet. Hand weeding can be reduced to 6 minutes per 100-foot bed by flame weeding after using stale beds that have been hoed three or four times. 

Caring For Your Carrots

Carrots do very poorly with competition, so try to start early carrots in a bed that had only light weeds the year before.

Later sowings can make use of the stale seedbed technique, where the bed is prepared ahead of time and one or more flushes of weeds are germinated and flamed or hoed off. 

Get to the initial thinning as soon as you can, spacing to about one inch apart, weeding at the same time.

You can do a second thinning to 3”, at the stage when the baby carrots can be used for salads. If you get more weeds you might do another round of weeding before harvesting the full-size carrots. 

If the shoulders of the carrots are prone to greening, you can hoe soil up over the crowns. When carrots are spaced too widely, they will be more likely to split, and the overall yield will be reduced.

Dry soil at the three to four leaf stage can cause forked or irregular carrots. Hairy carrots indicate either too little water or too much nitrogen.

Pests and Diseases

Carrots can be troubled by Alternaria and Cercospora, which both reduce yield and quality. 

Alternaria blight starts on the oldest leaves, which blacken and shrivel. The best response is to cut your losses and harvest them right away. 

Cercospora leaf spot starts as small dark spots with yellow edges on younger leaves and stems. Copper fungicides can be employed as a preventative measure or control. 

There are several insect pests of carrots. The main two are the carrot rust fly and the carrot weevil, both of which tunnel in the roots. 

The rust fly usually tunnels in the lower third of the root, and the weevil which has wider, more open tunnels generally works on the shoulders.

Covering the crop with anti-insect netting in mid-august during the fly’s egg-laying period is a good way to manage the rust fly problem.

If your weevil problem isn’t too bad you can simply pick off the affected carrots and sell them to your customers as juicing carrots. 

Some areas struggle with wireworms, which can be caught by burying carrot slices, and daily removing the captives.

If necessary row cover can be used to exclude flying pests.

For more information on pests check out these resources: Garden Insects of North America by Whitney Cranshaw and The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs fact sheets on carrot insects.

Deer are also a major pest for carrots as they eat carrot tops down to the nubbins and sometimes row covers do not stop them. Fences, guns, and dogs might.

Harvesting Carrots

Carrots develop flavour and colour at the same time, so harvest can begin as soon as they look and taste right. Carrots left in the ground too long may crack, and start to develop off-flavours.

If the soil is dry, gently water just before the harvest. This will ease the harvest mechanically and also improve the flavour of the carrots.

How you harvest will depend on the scale of your carrot farming, the needs of your market, and the equipment you have.

To harvest by hand, dig or pull up the carrots, collect them with a wheelbarrow or cart. This is what Pam does on her farm.

They then take the carrots into the shade, cut off the top (cut at the transition from green to orange if for immediate use, or leaving a short length of greens if for storage). 

As they cut, they put the carrots into buckets of water. When a bucket is full they give the carrots a quick rub over and put them into clean rinse water. From there they remove handfuls and drain them in buckets with holes in the bottom, before transferring to perforated plastic bags for the walk-in cooler. 

On J.M’s farm, they pull a few to check their size, loosen the soil with a fork, then gently pull them out of the ground and bring them to storage to be bunched fresh.

Watering right before harvest also makes pulling easier. You should not wait too long to harvest carrots, especially summer crops, as they will lose flavour and develop a different texture if left in the soil for too long. If carrots are split, they should have been harvested earlier. 

They generally put 8 to 12 carrots in a bunch. If they spot any carrots that have been speared by the fork or that are otherwise worse for wear due to gravelly soil, they go in with the juicing carrots.

They cut the tops off their unsold bunches and store leftover carrots in the cold room, saving them to make giveaway bags for their CSA Partners at the last delivery. 

Curtis uses a standard garden fork to loosen the soil, one row at a time. He starts with the outside row of a bed first, loosens the soil about an inch or two from the top. 

If the carrots are going to market, he snaps the tops off; if they are going to chefs, he will twist off the green so that he leaves a few inches on. Chefs often prefer to have one inch of green on the carrot.

Sometimes when the greens of the carrots get too long, they can crowd your walkways which can make it difficult to navigate the beds. You can make it easier to walk in the beds if you cut the greens off before harvesting. Take a sharp knife and cut off the greens while the carrots are in the bed. Cut them about 1-2” off the ground then proceeded to fork them out. 

Storage

With traditional storage methods, where root crops are buried in sand or ashes in a root cellar, unwashed roots store better than washed ones.

They also keep well in perforated plastic bags under refrigeration, and washed fruits store just as well this way as unwashed ones, with the advantage of avoiding the discoloration that can happen to unwashed carrots in storage.

Don’t store roots with fruits, such as apples or squash, as ethylene emitted by the ripe fruits can turn the roots bitter. 

Store carrots in humid conditions at near-freezing temperatures, but not below. Stored carrots will easily keep in the cold room for up to six months. 

Bottom Line

You should definitely consider growing carrots on your market farm as they are always a crowd-pleaser, store well, are fairly easy to grow, and just look awesome at your farmer’s market stand with the tops on.

Following the advice in this article should leave you with some Bugs Bunny approved carrots that your customers are sure to love!

Do you have any tips on growing carrots on your market farm? Please share in the comments below.

Stay Local,

Kathy & Jon

your friendly neighbourhood growers