Carrot issues

sandra255

We've grown some great carrots this year and both colour and flavour have been excellent  Just recently we've picked two or three that have this long slit which is too regular to have been caused by bugs.  Any ideas?

Dovefromabove

That's caused by erratic watering.  

sandra255

Thanks.  My feeling is that we've watered fairly regularly, but when you say erratic it makes me wonder whether that's due to the fact that we dug a soakaway from an erratic spring in the garden.  The soakaway runs across the top of the garden with three arms that run down between the vegetable beds.  Sometimes the spring flows, sometimes it dries up altogether and the flow rate has no relevance to the amount of rain or drought.  I'm wondering whether at times they're getting over-watered then.  We'll be rotating the carrots to another bed this year.  Thanks again.

Skandi

AH I dssagree on the erratic watering this late in the season.  I find that nearly all my carrots from a spring sowing split by september or so. No matter what the rain has been like. It does appear to be speeded up by lots of rain, but in general it is in my experiance a carrot that has been left in the ground too long.

Dovefromabove

Same thing Skandi ... if the carrot's matured it's begun to go dormant, and it then gets a heavy downpour then it'll start growing again and swell and split. If you're going to leave them in the ground growing main crop varieties rather than earlies will help. 

My brother grows acres and acres of the them for the supermarkets.  

Last edited: 24 October 2017 16:12:49