Let’s talk about carrots, shall we? Carrots have always been elusive to me. You know how some people say, “I’m not good at math.” Well, carrots are like that for me. In the end, after almost ten years of gardening, I finally had success. You would have thought I would have given up, but you can plant 16 in a square foot and they come in so many different colors! I couldn’t help but keep planting them. When I think back over those years, I realized that just about everything I needed to know about gardening, I learned from those carrots.
One of my main goals here is to help other novice gardeners skip years of errors and get right to the good stuff! So here is a list of 10 things I learned while screwing up carrots over and over.
1. Persistence is key.
I have been trying to grow carrots for 10 years, y’all! In contrast, I have had such an abundance of cucumbers, I have had my kids knocking on the neighbors’ doors handing them out! But I don’t think I have ever eaten a carrot from the garden prior to this year. At some point, you can just give up, but there is no real downside to failure in a garden. If something fails, so what, you just keep at it. Let that persistence spill into other aspects of your garden and your life for that matter.
2. You are going to kill some things on accident.
When you accept this fact, it really is liberating. The worst case scenario in gardening is that something either doesn’t grow at all, or grows but then it dies.
It sounds awful, because it’s death, but when you think about it in the scheme of life, there are some really big problems out there (ahem, pandemic anyone), but killing vegetables, that ain’t one of them. So go kill some stuff!
3. You have to kill some things on purpose.
Ok, this one is really hard for me, but I think this was the key to me finally being successful with carrots. Carrot seeds are tiny, think difficult to pick up and super small. Usually in a square foot garden, you are going to plant a couple of seeds in each hole and see what takes, but then you need to thin them out to one seedling, to give each plant the proper space to grow.
I have never been good at this. One reason is because I am a ‘plant it and forget it’ type of gardener and another is that thinning seedlings feels like murder to me. But in the end, you just have to do it. You have to sacrifice some leaves and seedlings and even fruit (gasp) while thinning and pruning so the plant can put its energy into growing some food.
Here is what helped me. I lovingly and with gratitude put those little leaves and seedlings into my compost pile and tell them they will live on in the soil someday. Circle of life, little seedling.
4. If you plant it and grow it, you are way more likely to eat it. And your kids might too!
I try my best to eat a lot of vegetables, but I don’t typically buy or eat carrots. The same thing goes for kale and collards. But when you have a successful crop of something, guess what? You start searching pinterest recipes for collard greens. If you grow it, it will….be eaten. I still grow a lot that I never get around to eating, but I can tell you my vegetable intake is exponentially higher when I grow it myself. And when your kids plant something and love on it, they just might want to eat it too! So plant more vegetables, eat more vegetables and do something good for your body.
5. Carrots teach math.
Now, admittedly, this came out of some coronavirus homeschool desperation, but I seriously taught my kids carrot math.
For my preschooler, I had him counting to three each time he put seeds in a hole. I had my kindergartener measuring half an inch on a ruler, and I had my elementary school kid multiplying 3 seeds per hole times 16 holes and figuring out how many carrots we might get.
Gardening is chalk full of learning opportunities for a variety of skills and math is just one.
6. You have to know when to plant.
This may go without saying, but you can’t just throw a seed into the ground any old time and hope that it grows.
My historic problem with carrots is that my natural tendency to think about my spring garden is about a month after my carrots should have been put in the ground already. Now clearly there was a mismatch in my desire to grow carrots and the actions I was taking to do so. I actually had to do some research and real planning in order to get my carrots in the ground at the appropriate time.
Every gardener needs to know their USDA plant hardiness zone. You can go to planthardiness.ars.usda.gov and put in your zip code and find out what zone you live in. You can also check out your local experts for information about when to plant. This link to Texas A&M Agrilife Extension is my bible. I actually learned how to make book marks on my phone specifically for this website (bexar-tx.tamu.edu).
7. You have to know what to plant
Do you know how I chose which types of carrots to plant? Based on their pretty colors and funky shapes, of course! But just like knowing when to plant, you have to know what to plant as well. The experts in your area have done all of this work for you and will have a list of the varieties of plants that grow well where you live. The big chain stores have to sell seeds and plants to the entire country, but we each have a unique environment and some plants are just more suitable than others. Take it from me, those really cute carrots on the package don’t mean much if you can’t get them to grow.
8. Not growing carrots doesn’t make you a bad gardener or a bad person.
This is hard, especially if you are a type A personality. When you set your mind to something, you want it to work, right? I know, I get it, I do too. But just like teaching me persistence, gardening has taught me that there are so many benefits in the process, it’s ok if things don’t go well. I’ve actually used this as a tool for my own personal growth. You can do a million things right and sometimes you just can’t grow carrots. That’s ok. It’s ok to not be perfect. It’s ok to give yourself a break and it’s ok to give yourself and your wimpy carrots some slack. Go ahead and spread that wisdom in the rest of your life as well.
9. Carrots have friends…and enemies for that matter.
Ok, so I placed my carrots willy nilly in my garden….for years. I was usually planting late and kind of throwing them in any space I could find. So imagine my surprise when I learned there are plants that complement one another! Carrots love tomatoes, leeks, onions, rosemary, radishes, lettuce and chives, just to name a few. Pinterest has about a hundred posts on this very topic. There is also a book called Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte that this blog post made me go to amazon and buy. If you would like to shorten your time to actually growing a vegetable, do a few minutes of research when you are planning your garden.
And just in case you wanted to know, carrots don’t like dill, parsnips and potatoes!
10. Carrots make me a better human.
Well, not just carrots, but growing anything really, makes me a better person. When I garden, I eat better and I exercise more. When you are planning to cook an entire bunch of carrots, it really makes you less likely to pair them with take out from McDonald’s.
Gardening makes me feel like a better mom when my kids are outside pulling up weeds, using tools, picking vegetables and doing carrot math! I want my kids to know where food comes from and have a skill they can use forever.
Gardening makes me think more about our planet. Since becoming a gardener, I compost every day. I make a lot less trash, I use less plastic and I recycle more. There aren’t many things in life that I can say fit this description, so I think that’s pretty powerful!
So there you have it folks! I have struggled for ten years to grow a carrot, but what I have gained in that time far outweighs the frustration. So forget kindergarten, everything I need to know, I learned from a carrot!