Kitchen Garden Forum

Following on from my posting yesterday, I forgot to mention that I planted a row of Autumn King, organic seeds, very expensive from Duchy originals (promptly christened Prince Charles carrots by my kids) and they were rubbish! Planted at the same time, and next door to the Flakkee, I have never seen carrots that forked/fanged so badly. So buying the so-called best, most expensive, organic seed is not always the best move, still, the rabbits like them!
Regards, essexboy.

Strange as our Autumn King grew next to our Flakkee carrots and both produced very good carrots as did our Yellowstone and Early Nantes varieties. Our seeds weren't expensive though and all came from Kings except Yellowstone which were T&M

Hi Essexboy, I always thought it was soil conditions that caused forking eg stony soil or too much nitrogen, never heard of seed as a cause before.

I've had my best results yet and I did 2 things differently: [a] I put moire leafmould than usual on the bed in autumn and [b] I used enviromesh all the year round, so I didn't get carrot fly.

The only thing I did differently was only to weed the carrots once when they were very small - after that I didn't remove the enviromesh at all - just to harvest.