Planting Carrots and Root Crops Part 2

After tilling I move any splayed soil back within the bed boundaries using the back edge of my bow rake.  I draw the soil about a half a foot away from the bed edge.  Before smoothing the bed, I sift random shovelfuls from the two beds through my one quarter inch mesh screen into my wheelbarrow; enough to fill one five-gallon pail.  

Then I continue raking / smoothing the bed with the back edge of the bow rake, always raking soil along and towards the edge.  I constantly circumnavigate the bed while raking it flat and gradually widening it until it fills up to the boundaries.  With my sandy loam soil, I prefer a flat bed rather than a domed bed – I get less erosion while watering.

Important Note:  All this is accomplished while Never Stepping On The Bed! 


Once the beds are widened, leveled and smooth, I use my row marker to draw lines, actually very small furrows, across the beds.  Each line is 12 inches apart starting about 8 or 9 inches from the end of the bed.  That gives me 12, four-foot rows in a 12 and a half foot long bed. (50 square feet)  With 12 inches between rows across the bed weeds are easy to see and remove when the carrots are young and when they are more mature their foliage nicely shades out most of the rest of the weeds. 

 

My over wintering carrot of choice is Bolero.  It gets sweeter as the season progresses, holds its taste and juiciness all winter long, and keeps excellently in the ground under a one foot deep cover of fall leaves, up to the following May.  I place a small stone toward the middle of the four-foot row and drop individual seeds one inch apart down the row starting at the stone.  This one at a time seeding is time consuming but very worthwhile later when thinning.  Fewer plants are disturbed while uprooting too many unneeded seedlings.  Plus good quality seed is never cheap.

After one side of the bed is seeded, I kneel in the opposite path and drop seeds starting from the centre stones to the edge of that side of the bed.  Of the two beds I sow one completely with Bolero.  After seeding, I grab double handfuls of sifted soil and toss it onto and across the line like a six year old would roll a bowling ball two handed, underhand down a bowling lane.  A quarter inch of soil or a bit less is just right.

I do the same with the second bed with carrot seed into the first four rows across the bed and parsnips into the next three rows.  I don’t know what kind of parsnips they are.  I had run out of seed and my son The Organic Grower (TOG) gave me some unlisted seed.  They work quite well, but I’ll buy some new seed next time.  The parsnips are seeded every two inches.

 

The remaining five rows (20 square feet) will contain Beets and Rutabagas.  For these I’ll need to fortify the soil with an organic source of nitrogen.  Following Steve Solomon’s advice, I use 5 lbs. per 100 square feet of either Alfalfa Meal or Soya Bean Meal.  Both are available as horse feed supplements at Otter Co-op in Langley.  A 20 kg. bag is currently about $16 for Alfalfa and $20 for Soya.  I feel the Alfalfa is faster working and the Soya is longer lasting. For my 20 square feet of beets and rutabagas I’ll use half a lb. of each.

 

These feed meals aren’t technically organic. But I believe alfalfa hasn’t been GMO’d yet and so hasn’t been sprayed with any herbicides.  The Soya might have traces of something in the feed meal just like our store-bought flours that are non-organic.  That is a whole new subject for another day.

 

The feed meals are sprinkled on like the previous amendments (the alfalfa can be very fine and dusty and drift in a breeze) and then raked gently in with the tines of my bow rake, re-smoothed with the back of the rake and re-marked with the row marker.  

The beets are Winter Keeper.  They are large and sweeten up later in the fall and keep well into May.  The Rutabagas are Helenor, from Johnny’s Seeds.  They size up exceptionally well, are nice and mild and we were pleasantly surprised last winter that they too stored well in the bed under the deep layer of leaves.  Both are seeded about 2 inches apart or maybe 3 inches for the expensive Helenors.

I then cover all the lines / furrows with my sifted soil and finish by laying six foot lengths of four foot wide wire fencing over the beds.  This helps to keep the neighbours’ cats from fertilizing and messing up my beds.  My yard seems to have the only freshly tilled soil for blocks and cats are a problem.  It’s very inadvisable to eat fresh carrots where the cats have gone.  Chicken wire also works but is harder to spread.

 

 

The next week is crucial for keeping the beds moist.  Cool cloudy weather is fine but with any hot spells I remove the fence wire and spread burlap over the whole beds.  The burlap is from cut open sacks that I've had for years and I water wand the beds with that burlap on it.  Stones are placed on the edges of the burlap to keep the wind at bay.  It is very important to check under the burlap each day to see when the seed starts to sprout.  Once bits of green are showing the burlap is immediately removed, the wire fencing replaced, and the beds watered (wanded) nearly daily with my sandy soil.

 

Happy gardening and one final reminder:  Never Step on the Bed!