How to Grow Carrots

Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to grow carrots in your own home garden!

Want to grow carrots in containers or in raised beds in a vegetable garden bed? Keep reading for all our best tips to grow straight carrots.

We’ll also cover how to prepare carrots for long term storage in your cold room or root cellar. And, we’ll even cover how to save carrot seed for planting the next year.

Aside from classic orange carrots, you can also plant other carrot varieties like yellow or purple carrots for some color variety and some subtly different flavors.

How to Grow Carrots

Carrots are such a staple for us and if your family loves carrots, you will find it’s well worth to plant some this year. They do need a few simple things (more on that below) but once they get growing, the maintenance becomes much easier.

Carrots love to grow in cool weather so they can be seeded as soon as you can work your soil in early Spring. Carrots love cold climates (although of course they also grow in more temperate climates); don’t be afraid to get your seeds in early. Once your soil can be worked, your are good to go.

You’ll be able to harvest fresh carrots from mid summer right through fall and into the beginning of winter is some gardening zones. Keep reading for specific tips and tricks we use every year here in our carrot patch.

How do Home Gardeners Grow Straight Carrots?

The number one tip of all our tricks is this:

You NEED rock free soil in the bed.

Growing healthy carrots also takes great soil, but you can never grow straight uniform carrots in soil that has lots of rocks and pebbles. If there are rocks, your carrot plants will find a way to fork around them and you will end up with some funky looking carrots.

So, before you seed, do the best job you can of removing any rocks!

What Kind of Soil Do Carrots Love to Grow in?

Check to make sure the soil has a fairly neutral pH and low levels of nitrogen (you don’t want too much nitrogen); opt instead for soil rich in potassium and phosphate by using lots of organic compost or organic fertilizer.

You may also consider mulching the soil after your plants are up, to help retain soil moisture and also provide some weed protection. Another good layer of protection is some kind of fencing or row covers, which will block rabbits and other pests like insects who will find the carrots and dig down to eat them.

Carrots like to grow in full sun in loose fertile soil, that is well-draining. So work to provide a a spot with loose soil to about a foot deep, then sow your Carrot seed in there. In about 70 days you can pull up beautiful long carrots, depending on the variety.

 

Sowing Carrot Seed

Sprinkle seeds about 1/2 inch apart, then cover with soil. You can use your hand to cover the seed or do as we do. Just hand sprinkle a bed of carrot seed, then very lightly drag a rake across the bed. We then throw a little extra soil on top.

If you do it this way, you may find it helpful to mix your carrot seed with some fine sand, which helps with distributing the seed.

Germination and Weeding of Carrots

Remember that Carrots take awhile to germinate, so don’t worry if you cannot see a sign of germination for 10 days or so.

We sometimes seed a few Radish in the rows as well. Radish germinates quickly, so we can tell where the Carrot leaves will come up.

This is very helpful when we are trying to do early weeding. Carrots (more than any root vegetable) are a bit of a pain to weed. I find it turns into spending some time in the patch on my hands and knees, but the end result is worth it.

Thinning Carrots

Thin the patch once the carrots roots are big enough to nibble on as baby carrots. As the season progresses, just keep harvesting carrots by thinning them, always removing those that are growing too close together.

The last carrots in the garden will grow to giant carrots, nice and thick and great for storing long term to eat over winter.

Planting Carrots in Beds Instead of Rows

Here’s about 10 rows of Carrots that were planted last year. We scattered seed, instead of planting strictly in rows. We find planting wider beds instead of rows results in harvesting more carrots.

I just make sure we can reach across the bed for weeding, without stepping in it. And we stay on top of thinning the carrots, removing those too close together.

By the way, if you are wondering what is growing above the carrot bed, that is Buckwheat that has just come up. We find a great way to improve garden soil is to use Buckwheat! You can read more about that if you’re interested in building fertility.

 

An early harvest of Carrot thinnings and Lovage. Lovage is a wonderful herb and we have a perennial plant, so it keeps returning every year. Each Spring, I cut lots of stems so I can dry Lovage, as well as other herbs.

By the time mid-Summer rolls around, we are able to harvest carrots fresh for our dinner table. We have also used them to make our own homemade Carrot wine!

But we always grow lots so that we can keep some over Winter. I have canned carrots before to eat over winter, but we prefer them fresh or stored in our root cellar.

How to Store Carrots for Winter Use

In the picture above, you can see how we store the Carrots. I take a bucket or a heavy plastic tote like this one down to the garden, and put a layer of soil in. This cold room storage method keeps the carrots fresher for longer, rather than storing them in a refrigerator.

Then I use my gardening pitchfork to carefully pry up soil around the carrots. Don’t try to pull them by hand unless you have very loose soil.

It is very easy to snap the greens off the top and then you are left with the root still stuck in the ground.

After getting the Carrots out of the ground, I trim the greens. Do NOT trim them right down, just leave an inch or so. Then put a layer of Carrots into the bucket. Add another layer of soil. Then add another layer of Carrots.

Keep going until your storage bucket is full. Make sure the top layer is soil, enough to completely cover the Carrots. Now they are ready to be stored in the Cold Room or your basement, wherever you can keep the temperature between 32 and 40F.

We do this every Fall and come January, the carrots we get from the Cold Room are just as delicious, firm and sweet as the day we harvested them in October or November.

How to Save Carrot Seeds

If you grow an Heirloom type of Carrot, why not leave one or two in the ground over Winter? Choose a few carrots and once really cold weather hits, cover the tops with a good layer of mulch to help protect the plant.

The following Spring, remove the much and soon enough, you will see some new growth coming from the Carrot tops. Leave the Carrots alone until the Fall.

You will see your Carrots  start to bloom then flower. When they are finished flowering, they will produce seeds on the top. Gather these and plant them the following year.

You won’t need to buy Carrot seed the next year – you can start planting your own. Do this every year with a Carrot or two and you will never need to buy Carrot seed again.

So, grow carrots this year. They are a great source of Vitamin A, which you need for good eye health and most people like them. Why not plant a row or two this year?

Some Varieties of Carrots

Read seed packets for information specific to the variety such as length of time to maturity, mature size, days to harvest time and more.

• Nantes – cylindrical and sweet with a crisp texture
• Red Core Chantenay – sweet with a unique red color
• Royal Chantenay – a great variety for juicing
• Danvers – a classic heirloom carrot that’s suited for heavy soil and has a rich dark orange color
• Imperator – this variety keeps its sweetness and crunch in storage
• Thumbelina – also called Paris Market, this variety produces round and bite-sized carrots

 

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• How to grow big Potatoes – everything you need to know.
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• Zucchini are really easy to grow and you will get huge harvests! Here’s how to grow just enough Zucchini.

 

originally published 2011; latest update March 2025.