Carrot care in the open field: how to grow it for a good harvest, secrets

Carrot is a rather finicky vegetable that is able to respond to unaccounted for nuances in the process of growing with a strange-looking crop and disappointingly low yield. Carrot care in the open field implies a strict sequence in each of the points of the successive stages of root development, and missing one of the points means jeopardizing all the work expended. How to care for carrots correctly?

What should be the bed for carrots

How to grow carrots? High yields begin with the preparation of the soil for planting, and initial preparations need to be made in the fall.A flat place is chosen in the garden, sufficiently illuminated by the sun during daylight hours and, preferably, previously used for planting cucumbers, white cabbage or cereals. Depending on what kind of soil carrots like, namely, neutral or slightly acidic, the alkaline balance of the soil is regulated.

To begin with, you need to assess whether the soil is suitable for carrots for this indicator. The easiest way is to collect a pinch of earth from the desired area on a piece of clean glass and pour it with table vinegar. Alkaline and slightly acidic environments will react with strong or moderate foaming (as when extinguishing soda), and acidic ones will not show changes.

You can also pay attention to the clogging of the area with grass:

• neutral soils are rich in lush long vegetation: nettle, quinoa, clover;
• Acidic soils that cannot grow sweet carrots will abound in mint, horsetail, violet and buttercup;
• burdock, alfalfa, small pharmacy chamomile and sow thistle will meet on the ground with low acidity;
• alkaline environment, the poorest and also not very suitable for growing carrots in the open field as well as acidic, it is characterized by: poppy, sweet clover, bindweed.

The second task in the question of how to grow a good crop of carrots is to create conditions for saturating the soil with oxygen. This is required so that the carrot tastes sweet and grows slenderly in length, and does not go horny and crooked in all directions, bumping into the firmament of unloosened earth. A clumsy carrot occurs when a vegetable begins to branch out in search of a convenient direction and softer soil, and not sweet - due to lack of air.

Light fluffy soil, not clogged with clay, is enough to work out with a garden rake, and hard, caked layers must be completely broken by deep digging.

How to plant carrots

How to grow carrots in even rows and evenly distributed along the groove? In order to get a good harvest, the vegetables should not sit tight to each other, which means that a distance must be maintained between the seeds that is convenient for thinning later. There are many such convenient ways in agricultural technology:

• with a mixture of flour and water, to a strip of paper towel or napkin, the seeds are glued at a distance of 2-3 cm from each other, then these tapes are inserted directly into the grooves after pre-planting watering;
• combine the contents of a bag of seeds with 1 glass of clean sand, mix everything and this mass is injected into a dug groove in a thin stream;
• 2 tablespoons of starch are boiled in a liter of water and this barely warm substance, with the seeds added to it, is poured into the prepared grooves;
• most gardeners, when planting this crop, traditionally plant seeds in the soil with a distance of about 4 cm and a row spacing of 15 cm.

What to do immediately after landing? The bed is covered with polyethylene, which is held until the first shoots appear. The vegetable is quite tolerant of low temperatures and even soil frosts, but prolonged cold is the reason why carrots go to the arrow to the detriment of root development.

Watering carrots

Carrots in the open field do not require as much regular as uniform watering - the plant does not care how often the soil is moistened, but the moisture level must be constant and unchanged. Deviation from the level of water saturation in the soil that is comfortable for the root crop leads to pathologies of root formation:

• superficial and slight soil moisture leads to the formation of a woody rhizome - the pale core of such a vegetable tastes bitter, and the carrot itself sometimes grows to bulky shapeless balls;
• when growing carrots, it is also dangerous to oversaturate the soil with watering - there is a risk of getting nondescript twisted freaks with branchy tops.

One of the signs of improper and uneven watering is a horned carrot with two or more root forks. To avoid mistakes of this kind, it is better to water the root crops, adhering to the approximate scheme:

• when the first shoots appear, 7-8 irrigations are carried out throughout the month, 6 liters of water per 1 m2^{2 plot;}
• in the first month of summer, the rate increases to 11-12 liters, multiplied by 5-6 waterings;
• in July there should be only about five waterings, but 13-15 liters per square meter;
• The onset of August entails a reduction in water consumption and labor costs - carrots are already growing on two irrigations of 6 liters of water each.

Irrigation is stopped 14-20 days before the day scheduled for harvest. Then the soil is moistened once to facilitate the digging process.

Weeding and thinning carrots

Growing carrots outdoors should be accompanied by repeated weeding, especially in the pre-emergence period, when weeds with powerful rhizomes may not allow the vegetable crop to sprout. Weeds should not be allowed to grow too tall - late weeding is one of the reasons why gardeners do not count useful crops later, because along with the grass, young tops of a vegetable that has not been grown are also in the common pile.

How to get high yields with regular weeding? There are two theories equally substantiated by the experience of gardeners on how to weed a vegetable:

• after watering or rain - this way weeds are easily pulled out with the entire root system;
• before watering, when the ground is dry - thin grass roots in this case remain in the ground and dry out, which prevents the germination of new weeds.

Another mandatory procedure, without which cultivation and care of this crop in the open field is impossible, is the competent thinning of plants in the garden. When the seeds are initially planted with the same distance from each other of 2-3 cm, thinning is a rather corrective procedure and not always necessary. Solid sowing by any of the methods when the seeds went randomly into the furrow , in the long term always means one or two stages of breaking through excess growth. Should it be done? Necessarily. The first thinning is carried out immediately, as soon as individual leaves can be distinguished from the sprouting greenery.

Often the answer to the question: why do carrots grow ugly lies precisely in the wrong actions when removing extra sprouts.

There are certain secrets of how to perform this simple operation correctly.

What to do and in what sequence to perform actions:

• before thinning, the beds should be shed abundantly from a garden watering can;
• the sprout should not be pulled, but pulled straight up from the ground without swinging it;
• you need to have a distance of 3 or 4 cm between the saved bushes;
• immediately after the procedure, the garden is watered with warm water.

At the same stage, it is customary to carry out the first hilling of carrots and the first loosening between rows. And, if the second part of the algorithm does not raise big questions, a lot of controversy arises about the first.

So - do I need to spud carrots?

Spudding correctly

Often, even from experienced gardeners, you can hear that carrots are not spudded. However, if you are not too lazy to do this painstaking work at least three times during the development of the vegetable, you can protect the future harvest from three misfortunes at once:

• from damage to the exposed part of the root by the carrot fly, which loves to lay eggs at the base of the vegetable;
• from protruding greenery at the top of the rhizome;
• from exposure to direct sunlight, which leaves burns on the surface of the root near the tops.

Since it is recommended to spud a root crop three times, the procedures are tied to certain phases: on the 5th, 7th and 10th released leaflet.

Vegetable mulching

How to grow large carrots and at the same time knowingly eliminate the risk of overdrying the soil, the danger of pests, and also significantly reduce the number of weeding and loosening? To do this, there is a technology for covering the soil with mulch, and the technique itself is called "mulching".

How to mulch a carrot bed? The most common way to mulch a garden bed is to cover the space between the rows of planted vegetables with hay, straw or sawdust.The latter option is preferable, since the shelter with sawdust retains moisture longer and is a more reliable shield against the invasion of cabbage and other pests.

Sawdust covering the soil has another important advantage over grass flooring - weeds do not germinate through it, while the dried grass itself can by default have mature and ready-to-sprout seeds that will grow on contact with moisture. Small chips have the same properties, along with sawdust.

Mulching carrots is recommended when the outer part of the plant reaches 14-16 cm, and the vegetable itself will be about 7-8 cm in diameter at the widest part of the root. Is it possible to mulch late varieties of root crops? Not only possible, but also necessary, since the shelter retains the temperature for a long time, which it receives from the sun during the daytime, and as a result, the roots turn out to be juicy and not cracked.

On the forums, there are often complaints like the following: "I mulch a vegetable crop according to all the rules, but the vegetable wilts, the tops fall off, and the result is a horned or otherwise ugly carrot that does not have sweetness."An important condition before carrying out the procedure is the drying of the material. Whatever mulching is done, the cover should not rot and thus serve as a habitat for the reproduction of harmful microorganisms. And the secret of the withering, falling tops is the rotting of the root, to which oxygen does not reach through the dense crust of damp mulch. That's all the secrets of proper mulching.

Typical mistakes

Let's name the most common mistakes of gardeners, answering the most frequent complaints why carrots do not grow:

• seeds were planted without pre-soaking or in insufficiently heated soil (the norm is 7-9 ^С);
• too deep sowing or incorrect furrow formation (it is supposed to deepen the groove by 2 cm, then tamp its bottom with the edge of the palm of your hand or a chopper handle);
• no watering before or after planting, or watering with cold water;
• abundant watering of the soil during the time until the sprouts have hatched out of the soil (until the green brush of sprouted plants appears on the garden bed, you can not water the garden);
• frequent watering with small amounts of water, in which moisture does not penetrate deep enough;

Why does carrot grow poorly? Perhaps due to the lack of a feeding element throughout the development of the plant. In unrested or depleted soil, vegetables will be thin, pale, covered with white hairs. A lack of potassium will immediately affect the density of the root - it will become stiff, and the absence of phosphorus will affect the taste - the carrot will become tasteless or even sour.

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