No-Till Carrot Strategies for Spring & Summer (w/ Videos)

Varieties by Season (zone 6)

Late winter sowing (Feb and March sowing): Atlas, Danvers, Mokum, Nelson

Spring sowing: Atlas, Bolero, yaya, Starburst

Summer sowing: Atlas, Bolero and bolero types, Resistafly, Yaya

Storage: I still struggle with our storage for storage carrots so I’ll let Jackson fill that in.

Farmer Jackson on storage carrots: For storage carrots in z6, I strictly use Bolero (5 rows on 30” bed top, Jang 10/14). Ideally, we’ll do a sowing the first week of August to attempt a solid germination using a lot of overhead irrigation and light row cover to prevent evaporation. If the germination is less than great, it gives us time to do one more sowing mid-August. We’ll harvest once the daylight hours drop below ten, sometime mid-December, cut the tops, wash them and—once drained and dry—go pack them into one-pound bags for market. We’ll pull perfectly good Winter-sweet carrots out of our cooler in late April.

Fall sowing: Mokum

Germination

We’ve found the best germination rates when soil is covered with both compost mulch and row cover. Sometimes compost mulch is enough, but carrots must stay moist for 9 days solid to get good germination. Some carrots at some times of year will take 14 days or more. Keep them moist. We have not found tarping to be necessary, generally speaking. It’s more work than it’s worth and then you have to fret that the carrots will also get leggy or too hot. I suggest light row cover if anything, that way you do not have to immediately stop what you’re doing and remove it. In the early Spring, the row cover will also help keep new mulch in place.

Cultivation

We spot cultivate. The weeds are fairly suppressed by mulch and when they do come through they rarely thrive. If they’re not going to go to see before the carrots are pulled, and aren’t competing with the carrots, they’ll get cleaned out with the harvest and next bed prep, so I do not do much preemptive weeding—only when I see issues like when the compost supplier throws in some lambs quarters seed for free. #thanksbutnothanks

Sizing

Don’t assume that customers want enormous carrots. They just want carrots. The last two years we have sold thousands of bunches of baby carrots and baby-ish carrots—they sell just as easily as large carrots, honestly. I see way too many people leave them in the ground too long and wind up losing profitability and being late to the market. By the time most people start bringing carrots, we have been “the carrot people” for weeks.

Harvest

Ideally, your carrots would simply pop out when you are ready to harvest. This is mostly true unless the patch gets too dry. If you have irrigation, irrigate the night before harvest to speed up the harvesting process. Otherwise, you may need a fork—broad or digging.

We do not band them in the field. Instead, we have learned that it is easier to clean them before banding, so we wash the bunches, then band. In this case, clean is better than lean.

Tops on or Off?

Carrot tops remove nutrients and moisture from the root, but they also help sell the carrots like crazy. Carrots without tops will not sell as well as carrots with them. At all. It sucks, but that’s the market. I do recommend telling the customer to remove the tops if they plan to store them for any length of time, and same to you. Remove the tops if they will be staying in your cooler more than a few days.

Pricing

We sell everything on our table at “1 for $3 or 2 for $5”—everything. Half-pints of strawberries, pints of squash, garlic, everything. So, we size bunches of carrots that fit that. For baby-ish carrots, that means around 10 to 12 carrots per bunch. Fewer per bunch as the carrots get bigger. Alex Ekins of Ace of Spades says he sells uniform baby carrots at 50 for $10, which is about comparable though more profitable if you can nail the uniformity.

And one last no-till carrot video, because why not?