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HYDROPONIC CARROTS

Give your carrots plenty of space. Sand is the best medium in your growing system.

Carrots

GardenLine | Vegetables | Carrots

Brian Baldwin

There are two good things about this time of winter. Even if you don't actually detect it, you can at least pretend to perceive the days growing longer. Secondly, most of the new seed catalogues should now have arrived, and nothing kindles warmer thoughts for gardeners on dark evenings than a hot cup of cocoa and a leisurely browse through the seed catalogues.

Most catalogues devote at least a page to carrots. Often the carrot page offers a baffling array of types and cultivars. Classification of the carrot itself is a somewhat confusing issue. This familiar vegetable arose as a natural variety of the EurAsian wildflower we know as Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota) - similar to dill, but with bright white umbrella- shaped flower clusters.

Centuries ago, a wild variety of Queen Anne's lace was found in Afghanistan with a thickened sweet-tasting root. As a natural variety of Queen Anne's lace, the carrot was named Daucus carota variety sativus. The "sativus" means "cultivated". In rare cases, a carrot may revert back to wild type. When garden carrots were brought to North America, a few plants reverted to the wild type and escaped to establish Queen Anne's lace as an introduced wildflower across much of this continent.Vegetables, Hydroponic Gardens, Gardens, Self Watering.

For their first few hundred years in cultivation carrot roots were purple. Orange roots showed up as a chance mutation in the mid 1700's and quickly became the favourite in Germany, the Netherlands and England.

The orange colour is due to a very high level of the yellow- orange plant pigment known (reasonably enough) as carotene. Although almost all plants contain this yellow pigment, the more conspicuous chlorophyll pigment (green) usually obscures it from view. When chlorophyll breaks down in autumn, or when a plant is suffering from poor nutrition, the underlying yellow carotene pigments of leaves become obvious.

It is their high carotene content which grants carrots the reputation of being good for the eyesight. Each carotene molecule we consume can be cleaved in our digestive systems to form two molecules of vitamin A. Since a deficiency of vitamin A results in night blindness, carrots were found to be the ideal vegetable for alleviating this condition long before the medical reason was understood. If a body has more vitamin A than necessary at any given time, this fat-soluble vitamin is stored in the liver. Because fish also store vitamin A in their liver, generations of protesting children were given a daily dose of cod liver oil to compensate for the low natural carotene levels in wintertime diets.Vegetables, Hydroponic Gardens, Gardens, Self Watering

The fat-soluble nature of carotene pigment is also apparent in the colour of butter. Churning cream into butter is simply the process of separating the fat (butter) from the water (buttermilk). Since the yellow carotene pigment is dissolved in the fat and not the water, the consolidated fat becomes "butter yellow." During winter, low carotene levels in cattle feed once resulted in pale butter. The high carotene levels in lush summertime fodder lead to brightly coloured butter. Commercially produced butter is now artificially coloured for year-round consistency.

Meanwhile, back in the seed catalogue, you will usually find four classes of carrots. These are based on root shape and date of maturity. The classes are: Danvers, Imperator, Nantes and Chantenay.

Danvers roots are medium-long, with broad shoulders that taper noticeably toward the tip. (Bugs Bunny is usually gnawing on is a classic Danvers shaped carrot.) This type was developed in Danvers, Massachusetts, in the 1870's.Vegetables, Hydroponic Gardens, Gardens, Self Watering.

Imperator roots are more slender at the shoulder than Danvers types and usually slightly longer. They taper smoothly from top to bottom. These are widely available for fresh winter market consumption where a long smoothly tapered root is a selling advantage in the produce aisle. They are late maturing and good for storing.

Nantes roots have a nearly cylindrical shape. They have almost no taper and both the shoulder and tip end abruptly with rounded ends. Photographs in seed catalogues usually emphasize this shape so strongly that a plate of Nantes carrots looks almost like a plate of frankfurters. They are medium-long, early maturing and usually eaten fresh in summer. They originated near the town of Nantes, France.

Nantes: `A & C Nantes,' `Caro-Brite,' `Caropak,' `Earlibird Nantes,' `Meteor-Rondino,' `Narova,' `P-Nice F1,' `PSX 18286,' `Starca F1,' `Special Nantes 616,' `Tamino.'

Danvers: `Bangor,' `Chancellor,' `Danvers 126,' `Karmaran,' `Nandrin,' `Napoli,' `XPH90W7,' `XPH90W74.'

Imperator: `A-Plus,' `Bejo,' `Carobest,' `Estelle,' `FMX 331,' `FMX 350,' `FMX 351,' `Imperator 58,' `Nebraska,' `Nelson,' `Nogales,' `Orangette,' `Prospector,' `Spartan Premium 80,' `Sunrise,' `Sweetness.'

Regardless of cultivar, carrot seed is small and light, yielding some of the weakest seedlings of the vegetable patch. On clay soils, poor germination is often a result of the thin crust which develops on the soil surface following rain. Since radishes germinate quickly and more strongly, they may be planted with the carrots to help loosen the medium and mark the row until the slower carrot seedlings emerge.

Thinning is almost always essential. While a crowded carrot row will exhibit healthy-looking tops, the roots will be thin, misshapen and often twisted around each other. If you plan to harvest immature carrots through the summer, thin the row the first time when the plants are only about an inch (2.5 cm) high, leaving one plant per inch. As you remove carrots to eat through the summer, try to increase the spacing of the remaining plants to three inches (7-8 cm).

A medium temperature in the range of 15 to 20° produces the sweetest, most tender and brightly coloured roots. Higher soil temperatures lead to stubbier roots with a woody texture and strong flavour. While the total percentage of sugar in a carrot root does not increase with age, there is a shift from glucose (simple sugar) to sucrose (table sugar). This causes a gradual increase in sweetness. Although some carrots are sold as "coreless," there is no such thing as a carrot root that is core- free. "Coreless" really only means they have smaller less- prominent cores than other carrots. Most of the sugar is located in the outer ring of flesh which circles the core.

Immature vegetables of all sorts are often sold for a premium price because of the general impression that "baby" vegetables are sweeter. With a well-grown carrot this is assumption is not necessarily true. Packages of "baby-cut" or "mini-cut" carrots are available in most supermarkets. These are simply mature carrots which were cut into short pieces and mechanically whittled down (as though having been put into a large pencil sharpener) to give them the appearance of "baby" vegetables. This process chips off some of the sweeter outside flesh which is then sold for use in dried soup mixes.

Vegetables, Self Watering, Gardens, Growing Systems, Build Your Own, Carrots.Harvesting of your carrots should be one of the last chores done in the vegetable garden each fall because the later you leave them, the sweeter they become.

Aster yellows is one of the few diseases that appears in the carrot patch. A carrot affected with this disease will have multiple tops, yellowish leaves, and a large number of very small hair-like root emerging from the shrunken taproot. The disease is caused by a virus-like particle brought to the plant by a feeding leafhopper insect. It seldom affects more than one or two carrots in the patch, so when aster yellows shows up, the best thing to do is pull that carrot and throw it into the garbage to prevent further spread. Like almost all plant diseases, aster yellows is in no way dangerous to humans..

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