5 ways to sow carrots

Small and light carrot seeds are difficult to sow evenly, and untidy seedlings can fall victim to weeding. How can you achieve even rows that are easy to notice and process, and ideally get rid of thinning? There is a way, and more than one.



Of course, you can just try and carefully pour the seeds into pre-prepared furrows. If there is no wind, you bend down low enough and do not rush, then the rows can be formed quite evenly. However, if you do not like standing over the bed and carefully measuring the number of seeds per 10 cm, you can try to change something.
 

Sowing carrots on toilet paper

The main advantage of this method is that you can prepare for sowing at any time. Even in winter. And at the dacha, when every spring hour is precious, do not waste extra effort standing over the bed, but simply lay out the blanks.

So, to sow carrots on toilet paper you will need:

• toilet paper of any quality;
• paste (homemade glue based on starch);
• scissors;
• seeds;
• tweezers or cotton swab;
• bags for storing different varieties of carrots.

1. Prepare the paste (dissolve 1 teaspoon of potato starch in 1 glass of boiled water and stir), cool it to room temperature.
2. Cut the toilet paper into pieces equal to the width of your beds, and then these pieces lengthwise into 2-3 strips.
3. Pour the seeds out of the bag and start gluing them one by one onto paper strips at a distance of 3-4 cm from each other.
4. When the glue is completely dry, roll the paper into rolls and put them in bags, on which you write the carrot variety or put the packaging from them inside.
5. When the time indicated on the package comes, lay out the paper strips on the bed at a distance of 15-20 cm from each other, sprinkle with soil and water generously with warm water.

Germinating carrot seeds in a bag

For this, you will need the seeds themselves, a linen bag and a noticeable place in the garden that you will definitely not lose or forget.

1. To reduce the sprouting period of carrots in open ground to 5-6 days, pour the seeds in advance into a linen bag (or several, if you are planting fundamentally different varieties).
2. Soak the bag itself in warm water, and while it is soaking, dig a hole in the garden bed to the depth of a shovel blade.
3. Put the bag of seeds in it and fill it with soil, and put an identification mark on top.
4. After 10-14 days, take out the bag.
5. Mix the sprouted seeds with sand and sow them at the usual depth, sprinkling soil on top and covering the crops with film or spunbond.

Sowing carrots in egg cartons

This method is controversial and will only work for those gardeners who have a lot of free space, but some still practice it, which means you can take a chance.

1. So, to begin with, you will need to save up egg cartons all winter, buying only cardboard ones.
2. In the spring, 3-4 weeks before it is time to sow carrots in open ground, soak the carrot seeds in warm water for a day or two.
3. While the seeds are soaking, put the egg containers in waterproof trays, cut off the lid, poke a few holes in the bottom and pour soil for seedlings into the "cups".
4. Spread the seeds in containers, 2-3 pieces per container, water.
5. When the shoots appear, the carrots can be thinned out.
6. When the temperature is right, plant the seedlings in the garden bed directly in the containers. Take care of the plantings in the same way as regular carrot beds. The cardboard will get soaked during the season and will rot completely over the winter.

Sowing carrots with a manual seeder

Small carrot seeds are so light that the slightest gust of wind scatters them all over the bed. In addition, no one has the patience to lay them out in a hole grain by grain, and if you sow the old-fashioned way, the shoots will be too thick and more than a third of the seeds will be wasted.

A manual seeder with a long handle allows you not to torment your back, bending over the bed, and not to overspend expensive seeds. Thanks to this design, the rows are even, the seeds fall into the ground at a certain distance, and no extra effort is required.

It is made from an empty flat plastic round jar (from herring or seafood), into the center of which a bolt in a plastic tube is inserted, attached to a long handle. A hot nail or awl is used to pierce holes every 3 cm in the ends of the container, slightly larger in diameter than the seed. Some gardeners also attach a small metal hoe above the plastic part of the seeder, allowing them to immediately fill the rows with seeds, but this is optional - you can close the rows with a rake after sowing.

A small triangular hole is made in the seeder lid, into which the seeds are poured. And to prevent them from flying away, a metal or rubber patch-lid is placed on this hole, secured with wire and opening not upward, but to the side.

You can sow not only carrots in this way, but also any other crop - flowers, vegetables or greens. However, for seeds of different sizes, you will need containers with holes of different diameters. As a rule, it is enough to have 3-4 seeders on the farm.
 

Combined planting of carrots and onions

Often the main problem when growing carrots is that their shoots appear very slowly, significantly lagging behind the weeds. That is, at the time of the first weeding, the carrots are still so small that a careless gardener can easily lose part of the plantings by damaging them. In addition, the carrot fly is not asleep, waiting for the shoots almost more vigilantly than the summer residents themselves.

The solution to both problems will be joint planting of onions and carrots. Firstly, the onion will quickly hatch and mark the rows, and secondly, its smell will scare away the carrot fly. You can also alternate carrots with other quickly sprouting crops.

How do you sow carrots and other vegetables with small seeds? Share your tips in the comments.