Today I harvested a few roots of my Carrots ‘Early Nantes’ that have been growing on my allotment, Plot 12A, for the last 3 months.
Back in May I prepared a deep narrow raised bed with loose soil into which I dug a lot of well rotted compost with the idea of maintaining the soil damp but well drained. I’d started the seeds off in the greenhouse & once the seedlings were putting out their true leaves I planted them in my allotment.
I have tried to make sure they were weed free as much as possible & I watered them several times when we had a few warm days, (not very many of those during the last 3 months!). I was reasonably happy with their growth but I had noticed during the last few weeks that they seemed to be pushing their shoulders out of the soil. So today I thought I would lift a few to see how they are getting on. I was disappointed to find that, in spite of my efforts to get a deep, loose soil with plenty of humus, they had become twisted & split!
What more can I do – short of removing all the soil & putting only compost in to take its place? I’d loosened the soil down to a fork’s depth, about 30cm/12" & mixed garden compost in to keep it loose & to keep it humid during the summer.
This entry is about
Previous Journals
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Comments
seeingreen wrote:
Could the compost be the problem? Forking of root veg is usually because of too much nitrogen I believe. How about some extra sand added to your carrot bed? And when you say planted out, were the seedlings module/cell grown? If not the twisting could be due to the transplanting – root veg don’t just like it.
Posted on 10 Jul 12 (11 months ago)
Amarylis wrote:
I can’t imagine there being too much Nitrogen in the soil. The soil is already like sand & the subsoil, no more than a spades depth down, is gravel & sand. I’d loosed the soil down to a spade’s depth as we had the same problem last year & then it was because there was a hard layer a few inches down that I had no knowledge off. But that was on Gerry’s plot. On my plot I prepared the soil in a very narrow bed, as you can see in the 3rd of my photos, which I dug over again just before planting out the seedlings that I had been growing in Gerry’s greenhouse. Last year I did the same & planted them out later. Perhaps you have hit the nail on the head with the transplanting. But I put them out when the first true leaves had grown, I didn’t leave them in to get rootbound.
Posted on 10 Jul 12 (11 months ago)
seeingreen wrote:
No it doesn’t sound like your bed conditions does it, now you’ve improved it. Last year I wasn’t ready to sow them direct so sowed in modules then planted out unthinned as then there was no root disturbance – thinned later when established. They seemed to do okay that way – no forking.
Posted on 11 Jul 12 (10 months ago)
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