Do These 5 Things to Grow GIANT CARROTS in Your Garden

Alright! This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Today we have another exciting episode for you. I'm here in Mansfield, Missouri, at the home of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. You can visit them online at rareseeds.com. Today's episode is to show you guys how you guys can grow super long jumbo carrots, right? The five tips that you need to grow super long jumbo carrots in your home. Now for me, carrots are a very nutritious crop, right? They're full of beta carotene. If you got the orange ones, of course I like the purple ones, full of anthocyanins. They got some really cool black and purple carrots at Baker Creek that you can buy online at rareseeds.com. And I'm here at their Tulip Festival. I walked their whole grounds and the coolest thing to me that I saw were these large carrots, right? I've never seen carrots this big. Have you seen carrots this big? Here's one of them right here. I have another one right here. I got to hold them sideways so you can see how long they are. We could hold them this way and kind of go up. They keep going up. These guys are super long and I want to share with you guys all the tips so that you guys can grow these super long carrots just like they do here. The amazing thing is this is not any necessarily special genetics. So the cool thing is that you can buy the same exact seeds that they use to grow these carrots because they sell them at the website rareseeds.com or if you visit them here you can pick up a packet. This is a special carrot variety from Japan called the Manpukuji carrot. You can see the little girl on there. These are the standard carrots like grown in soil, you know, in like the dirt. But if you want them longer, you got to use some special practices. So they do a lot of experimentation. They grow out a lot of the different seeds that they sell here to prove that they grow well, how they look. They actually will select for certain characteristics like growing super long or whatever. And they do a lot of experimentation. Unfortunately, there's only a horticultural staff of six and I think they need a few more workers here because the six workers got so many things to deal with. It's insane. So anyways, let's go ahead and head down to the greenhouses and share with you guys the tips for growing these super gigantic carrots. Alright, so you guys already heard the first tip which is get the right variety of seeds that are going to be proven to grow long. Once again, it's a Manpukuji from rareseeds.com. Next tip is you can see they got carrots growing here in the dirt, you know, just right in the earth. And this is not the way if you guys want to grow super long carrots, the earth, especially where you live, may have too hard a soil. If it's sandy, it might be good. But you really got to control the soil and have it nice and easy for that root to go down with no rocks. If you have rocks or whatever, it could like stop the growth of it. It could turn and get all knotty and weird. So if you guys want to grow them at least like as long as like on this picture here with the girl, you guys could build some kind of raised bed and fill it with the appropriate soil that I'll be covering next, right. But that's not the way they actually grew those super long three-footers. I'm going to show you guys that really soon. But yeah, this is the way if you want to get decently long carrots, fill up a nice raised bed with the right soil mix that I'm going to share with you guys right now. So the next tip is to use a good potting soil, right. What they're using here to grow that super giant carrot is the Pro-Mix BX. Some Walmarts even carry this Pro-Mix BX. Now the other thing you need to do, sometimes there's like large sticks and whatnot in here. You want to get these out. They may even sift this stuff out into a, through a screen to kind of get all the large pieces out, right. Then you're going to do the next step, which is actually to grow it in the growing medium so that you could grow those long ones, and it's actually right behind me. So it's this corrugated tube, and let's go ahead and move the camera back and show you guys the next tip on actually how they grew that long carrot that you guys just saw. So you guys can see they grow them in these tubes here that are a nice diameter, and they're super tall, like minimum six feet tall is how you need it. You're going to fill it up with the right soil and then plant the seeds in at the top. And then I want to show you guys the next tip. So the magic to grow those long carrots is they basically give the carrot an unobstructed large space to go down. They found that these tubes work the best to grow the long carrots. They basically do a four foot tube, fill it up with soil, they stack another section of the four foot tube on top, fill it up with soil so they're interconnected, and then they plant their carrot seeds at the top. The bigger tubes work best. They've also experimented with smaller tubes that I'll show you guys right now. They also have these perforated pipes here, like usually used for drainage pipes, that are about six feet tall, and they experimented with these, but they didn't like them as much because they kind of bent a little bit. Also, they may not have the nice girth needed to grow those super fat long carrots. That's why they recommend this size diameter pipe works a lot better. Now the other thing I want to let you guys know is that this is a day-sensitive carrot. So this carrot is best grown in the winter when the days are shorter. If you guys are growing carrots in the summer, you want to get an appropriate day-length carrot. That's something I learned about carrots that I didn't know before, and maybe that's why your carrots never really work for you, because you got to choose a proper day-length carrot for when you're growing them. All right, so up here we're going to show you guys next the tip on watering. So they got these little watering rings that basically just have drippers down there, and they may use those to start the seeds out, but they found that once you get them established, then it's best to hand water these guys. And most importantly, you don't want to just shallow water. You want to water them deep so that the water penetrates down and down and down. So you're not going to water them too often, but you're going to do a single deep watering to go really deep, maybe let it dry out a little bit, and then you're going to go ahead and do that again as needed to grow the super long carrots. So to review what you guys learned so far, it's not super difficult to grow long carrots. Number one, start with the right variety seeds. That would be the Manpukuji carrots. Number two, have nice growing tubes that you could actually, that's nice and easy, that you sifted out the soil so they could grow really long, really nice and easily, unencumbered. Number three, you want to have the right soil medium. They're using the Pro-Mix BX, but any kind of good potting soil that's been strained out of any kind of rocks or large sticks so that the roots could grow down really nice and easily, because if you hit something, then the roots could kind of get gnarly. You want to then use a little dripper to kind of get it started and deep water it. You don't want to get it too wet at the top later in the growth, because the top could rot out and then the carrots won't really grow that long. And the final thing is, of course, you want to have a good fertilization program. Very important. Their goal here is to grow organically, so with these carrots, they basically, they don't really stress a nitrogen fertilizer, but they do do a rock phosphate as well as some calcium, I believe. They also do compost teas as well as other organic amendments. I'll put a couple links down below to some of the organic nutrients and fertilizers and amendments that I use to grow healthy crops that are going to grow really large. So now you guys know the secrets to growing super giant carrots if you guys want to. So this is just one of many videos I've filmed here at the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, showing you guys my journeys through their different greenhouses. I have videos on sharing my favorite plants and seeds they're growing here, as well as, you know, showing you guys what you miss at the Tula Festival, as well as my talk that I gave here. Links down below in the description for those. If you guys like this short format video, please be sure to give this video a thumbs up and share this video with other people that want to grow super long carrots as well. Also be sure to click that subscribe button so you don't miss out on my new and upcoming episodes that are coming out every five to seven days. You're going to know where I'll show up or what you'll be learning on my YouTube channel on how to grow more of your own food at home. And make sure you click the little bell so you get notified as many of you subscribe. And finally, be sure to check out my past episodes. My past episodes are a wealth of knowledge. Over 1,600 episodes at this time on this channel dedicated to teach you guys all about how to grow your own food at home, and sometimes really even big ones. So with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see you next time, and until then, remember, keep on growing.