Why I Oughta...

Yesterday, I posted a photo of our first broccoli crown that has emerged and talked about our vertical vegetable garden container called a Greenstalk.  I put six Lieutenant Broccoli plants in one of the deeper rows in the middle of the tower.  In this earlier post , I covered a few of the other things in the vertical garden including herbs and a bell pepper plant.  In a few of the rows/levels, I also planted some Zinnia seeds as cut flowers, but that left one deep row (third from the bottom) empty.   Because it is one of the deeper Greenstalk levels, I thought we'd try something new (to us) in container gardening:  carrots.  In our previous, raised-bed garden in Elmhurst, we grew plenty of carrots from seeds.  My problem was NEVER getting the seeds to germinate, my problem was always in thin-ing them out enough to grow good-sized carrots.  Here's a post about the time I used carrot tape (went very well) and here's a series of posts from 2012 that shows the Touchon carrot

Inside of a bag of baby carrots from our dear friends at Trader Joes was this weird carrot paw.  The kids got a kick out of it and you can see that we kept it on the counter for a few days admiring it while it dried out.  This seems to certainly count as a novelty in the baby carrot game, right? We aren't in the "imperfect produce" world , but I would think this might not have made it past their folks?

Some of them are absolutely HUGE.  These were planted via seed tape ( post here ) and did pretty well in terms of size, but not so much on taste.  They were a bit woody tasting when eaten raw.  But...they sure do look awesome.  Next year, I'll see if I can optimize the growth to focus on taste.

This was the second year we grew carrots in our garden.  Last year, we had a bunch of those short stubby ones that I planted way too close together.  So this year, I decided to try to use carrot seed tape to make sure the seeds were evenly spaced and I wouldn't have to yank a bunch of seedlings out. Something happened.  Either I planted them too deep or the seeds in the tape had turned or something because I only ended up with about 20 or so carrot seedlings.  Instead of the 300 or so I was expecting. This is the first one that I pulled out to see where they were in their growth process.  They're much longer than last year and have a nice orange color up near the leafy greens.  I'm going to leave the rest of them in the ground a bit longer, so hopefully we'll have some carrot stick 'mixers' for a bloody mary bar during one of the Bears' games this season.

Over the weekend, I planted the rest of the seeds in our garden including these Nantes Half Long Carrots.  I've been deliberately trying to rotate the crops each season so these carrots are running where I had peppers last year.  In other cases, I've put something totally new where I've had things like tomatoes before. 70 days from now, this patch (below) should be full of lacy greens with some 'tasty' carrots underneath.

Last year, I planted a few rows of carrots via seeds, but because they were so small, I ended up with way too many seedlings spaced way too close together .  This year, I'm using a little bit of technology in the shape of 'seed tape' that will make planting these beauties a bit easier.    I'm going to focus on the root vegetables this year and pare back the tomato varieties in the garden.

The carrots are starting to mature to the size that is worth pulling.  There's tons left out there that I'll get to this weekend.