Home grown carrots all year round

Hi! I’m Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. You can subscribe to our newsletter to learn about growing trees and vegetables in Cape Town, or browse all our past newsletters.

Remember your ABCs! Always be Carrotting!!!

Today’s dumpling Monday. I start the filling before I write to you each week. I harvest and start cutting immediately.

I’m happy to report the second round of cucurbits (Pumpkins, cucumber, watermelon, etc) are up. I find I struggle to relax until the cucurbits are up. Our kids have a very important early summer tradition of complaining about eating zucchini every day, and I was anxious this year I wouldn’t deliver.

But today I wanted to encourage you to grab a bag of seeds and direct seed some carrots. If you’re in many parts of South Africa, we are lucky enough to be able to plant carrots ALL YEAR ROUND!!! [Except July]

I keep a large container of seeds and try to have three carrot spots at any one time. One spot of that I can harvest from, one close to harvestable size, and one small. In fact, I will plant more seeds almost every week.

Carrots grow best in soil that has not recently had compost added. So they follow after a heavy feeding crop. You can even experiment with planting them in unamended soil (soil that hasn’t had anything done to it- in our case sand). The great thing about seed is that it’s relatively cheap, and you can use the experimental process as a super affordable private workshop.

I’m cheering you on in your ABCs: Always be Carrotting!!!!

In summer especially, plant carrots deeper than typical- about 1cm deep. They take a long time to germinate and you don’t want them to get wet and then dry out.

Carrots grow beautifully in cement blocks in our rainy season. No irrigation required.

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