Kitchen Garden Forum

Oh, that clarifies it, Geoff and Johnboy. So I will move the carrots about, as usual, but I will certainly try pelleted seeds and might build a moveable frame for them like you, Geoff.. Looking at Moles Seeds website, I see that they offer quite a number of carrot varieties in small quantities and pelleted.

Johnboy wrote:Hi Geoff and Monika,
I know that Colin M had a little bit of a problem with germination a few years back

Just to clarify, I've used several types of pelleted seeds with much success, but have never tried pelleted carrot.

My germination problems have been with ordinary carrot seed and I often wondered if the problem was caused by the soil drying out (sometimes I can only get down to my plot once a week). Hence starting them in a bag of damp compost (which usually works for me).

I prepare my carrot bed by first digging as deep as a spade (1 spit deep)
and if the plot has never been used to grow carrot before I fetch out a trench and riddle the whole row removing all the stones. This I do the autumn previous to the sowing. I then cover with FYM allow to get rain soaked and then cover with black H/D Polythene and leave until the next spring and remove the Polythene and remove anything left on the surface where the worms have missed small patches. I very lightly fork over and rake to a tilth and leave the Polythene off until there is a show of annual weeds germinating and I then replace the Polythene and this kills of the first flush of weeds. When the weeds are done for I then sow my carrots.
These will germinate before the next flush of weeds which makes it easy to see how good your germination is. I leave the row markers in place and if the weeds are begining to crowd out the carrots I run a line between the markers to tell me where the carrots are and then either hand weed (unusual) or hoe the weeds out. A lesson learned from bitter experience of hoeing out the carrots!
JB.