Getting a jump on the season: Carrots

Well, I've been doing some complaining about not starting early enough, and here I find out I started my carrots too early - let me back up.

A friend of mine introduced me to a local gardening power team, Gene Bazan and Tania Slawecki. I've visited their impressive production system twice now, and brought home lots and lots of ideas, some more feasible than others given the attention I can afford to dedicate to the garden realm. You can read more about their system at neo-terra.org.

One of these ideas was to start carrots in flats rather than direct seeding them. Typically, this is ill-advised because the carrot root is so fragile and transplanting is so tedious. But Gene succeeds, and there are certain advantages. Carrot seeds take quite a long time to germinate (2-3 weeks) and the soil must be maintained evenly moist during this period. I accomplished this one year (or perhaps the weather cooperated) but other seasons, especially summer planting for fall harvests, I have not managed to get out there and water regularly enough to assure carrot germination.

This year, I thought I'd give Gene's method a try - and I was thrilled with the results. A high rate of germination in just 4 days! I moved the flat (a reused plastic organic spinach pack from the grocery store) out to the cold frame for better light.

But having sprouted 3 weeks ago, none of the seedlings have true leaves. All of the cotyledons are a beautiful healthy shade of green, they just don't seem to be growing.

So I started investigating light and temperature requirements (great article from Plant Pro here) and asked Gene for more guidance. Here's what I learned:

1. Carrots develop the root length in as little as 3 weeks.
2. Carrots develop the root length within the first 50 days.
3. "An increase in early storage root length after emergence is favoured considerably by constant temperatures of 20 or 24°C." (20c=68F)
4. "Preferred growing conditions for most carrot cultivars are warm day and cool night temperatures and this usually provides the best combination of root length and diameter."
5. Gene starts his seeds around March 30th to transplant May 4th (State College, PA dates)
6. When transplanting, Gene's seedlings are about 2" tall and have ~4 true leaves.
7. To transplant Gene inserts a narrow trowel, pulls the prepared, finely textured soil back, and drops the 2-3" long taproot straight down into the void behind the trowel before pulling it out and settling the soil.
8. Gene's preferred are Danvers and Danvers half-long for heavy clay soils.


But I'm still not quite to the bottom of why my carrots aren't sprouting true leaves. Clearly, I started them too early, about a month earlier than Gene. But the Plant Pro article seems to say they like warm days and cool nights, which is about what they are getting in the cold frame - although nights may be too cold? We have been having the steadiest string of gray gray days. Light definitely could be an issue.

Verdict? Since they haven't actually died, I'm going to allow the experiment to play out. I'll keep them in their flats, in the cold frame until they sprout leaves, or until the seeds I'll start this weekend (on Gene's schedule) beat them in the race. There's a definite chance they won't win this competition, but I've always had a hard time pulling a living plant - except dock, but that's another story.