The love of Carrots

Carrots are a wonderful vegetable that grow easily in most climates given adequate water. They're very useful in the kitchen and contain loads of nutritional goodies. The idea that carrots gave you great eyesight was an invention of the RAF during world war 2 when England had developed radar technology to detect the German bombers. Not wanting the enemy to realise the threat, they invented a story about 'cats eyes' cunningham, a fighter pilot who could see in the dark as a result of all the carrots he'd eaten.

Carrot Seed are tiny and the biggest hindrance to successful germination is keeping them moist. They're sown quite shallow, so regular watering or covering the drill with wet newspaper will help to keep moisture levels up. Well cultivated loose soil is essential for long straight roots, over fertile soil will cause forked or hairy carrots (covered in fine roots).

As the seedlings come up they need to be thinned to allow the roots room to develop.


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If you are happy to thin your carrots more than once as they grow, you can first thin them to about 5cm apart, and then to 10 cm apart. The second round will probably be large enough to eat as baby carrots.



When your remaining carrots have enough room to continue growth unchecked, make sure you give them a foliar feed with a weak seaweed solution, comfrey tea or the like. The foliage will droop as they will have provided some mutual support, but within 48hrs they'll be back up and growing.


Remember when harvesting any root vegetable to cut off the tops as soon as they are out of the ground to keep the foliage from drawing on its stores in the root.





Any thinnings too small to eat will be interesting to scratch around in for the chooks.

The setup...

So how is the garden set up? well the front garden we try to keep for ornamental plants. Not that vegetables don't look great, vegetable gardens can be very ornamental, but the back garden raised beds were designed and built with budget before appearance. Fruit trees and Artichokes are all in the front as well as one raised bed bordered with aesthetically pleasing red bricks.


The back garden is more functional, it is home to the chooks, four of the raised beds, a large ground level bed, the garage, laundry (homebrew centre of excellence), washing line etc. The front garden therefore is like a permaculture zone 3, it doesn't need a hell of a lot of attention, the fruit trees get the benefit of a grey water hose which comes from the shower. We have found a local organic shop that sells organic shampoos and conditioners (for Sarah's benefit, look at my pic) and we use them sparingly. The back garden is like a mixed permaculture zone 1/2, and with a little forethought we can plan to have the labour intensive crops in raised bed 4, which is a little closer to the back of the house. The ground level vegie bed in the back gets the benefit of a grey water hose from the laundry and we buy a garden safe laundry powder. This is the best solution for us because the ground level bed carries taller crops, so the edibles are further from the ground and also therefore the grey water, and because in a drought stricken land every drop counts.

Cheers Aldrum

The dream begins...

What we do to try and provide our own requirements is to a certain degree based on the permaculture principles, however when your block is as small as ours there are certain compromises to be made. Our front garden is made up mostly of ornamentals some of which I'm proud to say are native... Pretty much what we have is inherited from the previous owners, neither myself nor Sarah Belly are very knowledgeable regarding ornamentals. There is also a miniature peach tree, a miniature nectarine, two miniature apples, a kalamata olive (a must in a very European/Mediteranean Brunswick), several artichokes and as of recently a 2.5*1.2m raised bed (owned & operated by Sarah Belly).

In the back garden we have a laundry containing the hot water service which gives us a warm microclimate for homebrewing. Besides this we have a chook run and hen house, 4 raised beds, and one standard (non-raised) bed. Initially I had to construct raised beds along one boundary to lift vegs out of the reach of the roots of a neighbours peppercorn tree. Very shortly after I had lost blood sweat and tears constructing the raised beds (an accident prone with his first angle grinder experience), they removed the tree...


Here is the first raised bed, (along with the wicking experiment), the wick was never going to work in a high raised bed built with the "no dig" method as the drainage is too good and you can't create a shallow enough sink to wick from, kids learn from my mistakes...








Then the second smaller one...
Jemima and mascara were suitably impressed..











Then there were four...

O.K. so they weren't pretty in the classical sense, but, they are very practical and extremely productive. imagine them with healthy, tasty, fresh veg pouring out of them.


Cheers Aldrum