Carrots are go

In the words of Ron Jeremy you need a nice tight hole and moisture at all times. Following his expert advice I've achieved 100% germination rate on my Sweet Candle stump carrots by making sure the compost surface has never been allowed to dry out. Growing in such a free draining mixture as we do it's easy for the top inch of the bore hole to dry out very quickly in warm weather, meaning the seed will either not germinate or worse, the seedlings will burn off just after germination. As I always go home for lunch I've been able to water if necessary during the hottest part of the day, and it has certainly paid off.

With my stumps I've also kept the bore holes quite tight, just 3" dia, with no extra boring out from a crow bar. I just cored out a long plug of sand with a length of plastic pipe and left it at that. I been thinking about this for a while (and it may well backfire) as I figured it was wasteful to have a 4" dia bore hole when the carrots are generally no more than 40mm dia. I also think a tighter hole will help to get straighter roots come harvest time, although I will have to be careful that the carrots don't split when extracted from the confines of their tighter than usual straightjacket....although I think frequency of watering has more to do with this.

This is the first year I sowed my stump carrots before the long ones. The reason being that Sweet Candle needs anything from 18 to 22 weeks to form the stump end, which is always the last bit of the carrot to develop. Also, I suffered poor germination with long carrots the last couple of seasons, late March sowings succumbing to cold weather in early April. My long carrots have now been in for nearly 2 weeks and should start popping through soon.