Wednesday was another dull August day but there are rumours about that the weather may pick up a bit next week for a few days only. We shall see.
We've had plenty of fresh vegetables from the plot over the last month or so without missing our carrots which have been left to their own devices growing away under their environmesh tent.
The last time I remember looking in the tent our carrots looked like this. We were a bit concerned that slugs had decimated a couple of rows of young carrot seedlings so we made some extra sowings. Since then Sue’s weeded a couple of times whilst the carrots were quite small. Despite using weed control fabric some weeds do grow between the seedlings and the edge of the cut fabric.
I thought it was about time to look inside the tent and see how our carrots had performed.
This is the tent from the outside and apart from looking full of green vegetation there’s not much of a clue as to how our carrots had grown inside it.
Inside was full of lush green carrot tops and not too many signs of any large weeds although I’m sure there will be some in there somewhere. So the only thing left was to carefully move some of the tops aside so I could manoeuvre my fork between the carrots and weed control fabric and lift our first “Early Nantes” carrots of the season.
The first signs were good and a combination of easing roots out with the fork and pulling the carrot top revealed some decent roots. We always get some smallish carrots because, going against all good gardening advice, we never thin out our carrots. Our method works too so I'm not going to change it.
We had one rather enormous carrot and a few medium sized ones together with a few smaller carrots but all of a useable size. A couple of carrots had forked but had done so at the very end of the root and we don’t mind odd shaped carrots. None of the carrots had any slug damage to the useable parts of the carrot but the largest one had been nibbled around the shoulder which had turned a little green and needed discarding in any case.
If the remaining crop are like this I won’t be complaining. They've already had the taste test which they passed with flying colours.
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Brilliant. We didn't get round to sowing any in the ground, but there's an old water tank on the plot which we sowed a few in out of the reach of the carrot root fly.
ReplyDeleteThey're wonderful. I'm very envious, I just cannot grow carrots. There was one at the allotment, out of about five thousand seeds sown. I haven't checked on it for a while, I shall look tomorrow and see if it's still there. I'm determined to grow them though, I'll try again next year.
ReplyDeleteYour carrots are looking good I had a small crop which I picked a couple of weeks ago have a blessed weekend
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