Red carrot

You have two options. If you harvest before the first hard frost, twist off the foliage and layer the unwashed roots in damp sand, cool, dark and frost-free in the cellar or in a clamp. If you want to leave them in the bed, cut the foliage off just above the ground, earth up the root crowns with soil and, before frost, cover the bed completely with a thick layer of leaves, straw or horticultural fleece. In severe continuous frost, it is better to harvest and store in good time, because roots frozen through spoil when they thaw.

You propagate the red carrot exclusively by sowing. Other methods are not practicable for this vegetable: the thickened storage root forms no shoots or side roots from which division, cuttings or offsets could be taken.

For growing, sow directly in the outdoor bed, because carrots do not tolerate transplanting (taproot). Sow from March under horticultural fleece or from April/May without cover in rows about 30 cm apart, only 1 to 2 cm deep. Germination takes two to three weeks; keep the bed evenly moist during this time. As soon as the seedlings are about 5 cm tall, thin to 5 to 8 cm spacing in the row.

For saving your own seed, use the biennial life cycle: choose only an open-pollinated variety. Saving seed from F1 hybrids is not worthwhile, because the offspring are not true to type (colour and shape split). In autumn, select particularly fine, healthy roots typical of the variety (ideally 10 to 30 of the same variety for good pollination) and discard any that wanted to bolt in the first year. Overwinter the roots unwashed in damp sand in a cool, frost-free place (0 to 5 °C) and plant them back in the bed in spring. In the second year the plant forms tall umbel flower heads; let them flower out completely and the seeds ripen fully. Since carrots are cross-pollinated and pollinated by insects, they cross easily with other carrot varieties and with the wild carrot (Daucus carota subsp. carota); both are the same species. So let only one variety flower at a time and keep a large distance from wild carrots (several hundred metres; for strict varietal purity 800 to 1000 m applies), or protect the plants under a fine-mesh fleece cage. Harvest the umbels in the early morning hours when they are brown and dry (usually August to October), and dry them further indoors. Store the seed cool and dry; carrot seeds stay viable for about 2 to 3 years.