Seed tapes

[Monika]

For next spring, I am seriously thinking of buying seed tapes for our carrots (Amsterdam Forcing and Autumn King are offered by DT Brown), because I am sure the carrot root flies get into the carrots when I am thinning them out. They are grown surrounded by 3' high fleece and covered with a double layer of fine netting through which I do the watering, so the only time the netting is removed when I have to thin them out.

Has anybody tried seed tapes? The cost seems to be almost the same as loose seeds and I never use a full packet of seeds (like 700 seeds!) anyway.

This year's carrots are only slightly affected by carrot root fly but I should love to keep them out altogether one year!

[donedigging]

I bought some parsnip seed tapes last year, as I thought they would germinate better .....
I was wrong, after sowing two rows of tape... I have only one parsnip to harvest
(the excitement of when to harvest it is unbareable )
Maybe not a fair comparison as every thing this year went wrong.
Going back to seed next year

[John P]

Twice in the last four or five years I have used carrot tapes,and have had a much smaller crop return compared to normal drill sown seeds. Maybe it was my method or the soil to blame or could be weather conditions,but I doubt if I will be using them again.JP.

[solway cropper]

Monika, I'm plagued by carrot fly as well and my answer is to grow them in containers raised off the ground. It's a bit of a faff but I also sow the seeds individually so there's no thinning. You can get a good crop of small carrots from a plastic flower bucket and if you use bigger containers you'll get...bigger carrots.

[Johnboy]

Hi SC,
I can honestly say that covered with anti white fly netting I had no carrots affected by carrot root fly at all.
I suspect that Monika is probably correct when she says they slip under the netting when thinning out is done. I sow my seed one inch apart and never thin until there is something meaningful to eat on the end. This means that I slip a hand under the netting and pull every other carrot and the net is hardly disturbed at all. The only problem I have had this year is from Voles that manage to burrow under the netting and eat around the tops of the carrots without touching the foliage but make them hard to pull so I have pulled them all and put them into store.
The damaged ones I have processed and have been frozen.
I have Late Carrots still in the ground but I have put an aviary wire barrier buried 6 inches into the ground which so far seems to have worked.
JB.

[oldherbaceous]

Morning Johnboy, do you still use pelleted carrot seed, as others might be interested in the supllier.

Well i think i remember you mentioning pelleted seed.

[Parsons Jack]

Good morning DD,

Moles Seeds offer some pelleted seeds. http://www.molesseeds.co.uk/index.html
Very good value their seeds are as well

I've never used seed tapes before, and after your experience I don't think I'll bother.
Would you like me to send you up some of my 90 odd parsnips

With carrots, I sow them thinly, cover them with fleece, and let them get on with it. I've had no problem with the dreaded fly at all

[Johnboy]

Hi OH,
Yes I still use pelleted seeds and that is why I can say with certainty that I sow one inch apart.
As PJ has said Moles Seeds are of extremely good quality as is their service.
Pelleted Seeds offer good value for money, especially for people, like me, who have arthritis in their hands.They give precision sowing and reduce the need to thin so stringently so not so many seeds are needed.
JB.

[Kleftiwallah]

Go to the Haberdashers, buy some bias binding and make your own seed tapes. Easy Peasy, fiddly but easy peasy. Cheers, Tony.

[Colin_M]

Just to concur with others, I have tried seed tapes in the past with poor results. Don't know whether this is because they are fussy about technique but I'm sure there are better solutions to carrot fly.

And to echo the above, pelleted seed would help you sow with similar accuracy.

One final point - I have often had poor results getting carrot seed to germinate. I'm sure it's my fault & nothing else. I ended up mixing some seed with a plastic bag of compost, waiting for the seeds to germinate, then "sowing" the mixture into shallow trenches. I'm not suggesting this is the answer for what you're after, but it also allows me a degree of control over the density of carrots.

[Monika]

Many thanks, that's been very useful. The seed tapes don't seem very successful, so I will go for pelleted seeds, I think.

We can't grow them in raised beds because we are not supposed to have any "structures" on the allotment, other than a shed, and because it is a very windy site, the little blighters would be blown upwards and over any barrier in any case, so the carrot bed needs covering securely.

On the parsnip seed tape, done digging: have you tried growing parsnips the "Johnboy method"? Somebody will be able to dig up the reference to it in the KG archives, no doubt (Alan?!), but I have used this method for a few years now and it works like a dream.

[Geoff]

I've used my carrot cage since 2005 and have never had more than one or two attacked carrots. It consists of 6 panels 2'x5' that surround an area 10'x5' and it has a lid, all covered with fine mesh. I deeply fork the ground and remove stones, feed, rake then sow thinly on the surface in 6" wide strips a foot apart. Lightly cover the seed with sifted mixture of soil, sand and leafmould, water if it is dry, sprinkle with new type slug pellets and put the lid on. I sow about a third at a time through the season, finishing with James Scarlet and Autumn King as maincrop. Using slug pellets in this closed environment has stopped apparent failed germinations, I'm pretty sure slugs are why people say my carrots don't germinate. Perhaps the flies don't get in while I'm weeding and sometimes thinning because I take the lid off but leave the sides in place, although I don't subscribe to the low flying theory, the little blighters must be tossed all over the place in the wind.

[Monika]

Geoff, you mean you have grown your carrots on the same site since 2005? I would love to do that because we have a spot on the allotment with particularly 'carrot-friendly' soil, but I have not dared to do that and only used it every three or four years. If I could keep them in the same spot, that would be ideal, not least I could, like you seem to have done, build a semi-permanent frame.

[Geoff]

Apologies for confusion, I dismantle and move it every year. But if you haven't got over wintering fly (I assume they pupate) I wonder if you could leave them in the same place for more than one year?

[Johnboy]

Hi Geoff and Monika,
Taped seed was first around in the very early 1950's and it was a failure then as I suspect they are now. Pelleted Seeds on the other hand have been extremely useful to me and germination rates are very high with me.
I know that Colin M had a little bit of a problem with germination a few years back which rather deterred him from using them but fortunately I have not had the problems that he experienced.
I would say that if you had no disease or fly problems it would be possible to grow for more than one season in the same soil. My thoughts on that are that I would advise against it. My Carrots are always grown on a new site every year and will continue to be grown that way.
The only permanent bed that I have is for my Runner Beans and the only problem I have encountered is this year and that was with a Mole invasion and nothing to do with the beans at all. I think this year was the 16th year with growing beans in the same bed.
I find that Carrots seem to run out of nutrition around the end of June and the begining of July and mine are given a feed of home produced Comfrey Tea and they then seem to perk up. Certainly the foliage becomes a beautiful green again but whether it does anything for the Carrots themselves is very debatable.
JB.