How to grow carrots

Carrots are a biennial root crop grown as an annual, direct-seeded rather than transplanted because the taproot does not tolerate being moved once it forms. Home gardeners grow them for the sweetness and crunch of a freshly pulled root, in shapes and colors well beyond the tapered orange root sold in stores. The crop occupies a bed through most of a growing season, sown in spring or again in late summer for a fall crop, spending most of that time as a modest, feathery-topped row while growth happens underground.

The hardest part of growing carrots well is preparing soil the taproot can push through. University of Maryland Extension calls for deep, loose, well-drained soil free of rocks, clods, and debris, since a growing root cannot part a solid obstruction. A second-year gardener who direct-seeds into a bed still holding clay clumps or buried stones left from a previous crop, having gotten away with it for looser-rooted vegetables, will not find out until harvest that the roots split, forked, or curled around the obstruction instead of growing straight down. The result is not a smaller carrot but a misshapen one, too twisted to peel or slice cleanly, and no fertilizer afterward fixes a forked root.