Carrot Seedlings!

These are some other seedlings we planted in early January. As you can see in the picture they are in little pots made of newspaper. I treated myself to a gardening kit for christmas and one of the things that came with it is a paper potter. It is used to turn old newspaper into little seedling pots - the business! I made them as tall as possible - they are around 6 inches high and around 2 inches wide.

There is mold growing on all the pots at the moment - it's the furry stuff in the picture. This is totally fine and won't harm the plants. It's the combination of compost, paper and wetness. I'm probably over-watering them so it'll dry out when I get the balance right.


January is very early for planting carrots though and most people I asked about it said that Febuary even was pushing it a bit, so I don't have a huge amount of hope for the little guys. Carrots have a thing called a tap root - a long, fast growing thin white root that goes straight down. This then swells over the growing season to become the carrot. If the carrot doesn't have enough room to grow down then the tap root gets twisted leading to some crazy mutant shaped carrots. The worry is that the root will reach the bottom of the pot long before it's warm enough to plant them out.

Here we have yellow carrots 'Jaune Obtuse de Doubs', regular orange 'Nantes' carrots, red 'Samurai' carrots and finally purple 'Purple Haze' carrots. The full carrot rainbow!