rows

How To Grow Your Own Carrots

It is much better to grow your own vegetables from home, not only do they taste much better, but they are also much cheaper and healthier. Once you start growing your own vegetables, you will never want to go back to buying them from supermarkets.

You shouldnâ€™t worry about growing your own carrots from home as it is quite an easy and quick process, as long as you have a little time to prepare your carrot seeds and to plant them.

Step One

The first step to growing carrots is to sow the carrot seeds. This may sound a little complicated, but trust me, once youâ€™ve got the hang of it, it wonâ€™t ever be a problem again.

You should first make sure that you are planting your carrot seeds at the right time of year, it should say on the back of the packet when it is the best time to plant them. Most varieties of carrots are usually planted in March, if you wanted to get a start on your vegetable growing earlier than this, you can buy the Scarlet Horn or Nantes variety which can be sown in as early as February.

Before you begin sowing your carrot seeds, you are going to need to prepare your soil. You should prepare quite a large patch of soil; to make sure that it is healthy for your carrots to grow in you should dig it up and remove any weeds, stones and debris.

Step Two

You are going to need quite a lot of space to sow in your carrot seeds, the soil also needs to be quite deep so that the carrots have plenty of room to grow.

You should sow the seeds directly into drills. You should aim to sow them half an inch deep and 15cm apart.

Step Three

You need to keep your carrots healthy and fresh; to do this you should water the compost on a regular basis. If you start to notice that your carrots are wilting, this means they are not getting enough water. Give them a good soaking and this should rescue your carrots from any problems.

Step Four

It will usually take around 12-16 weeks for your carrots to grow properly. Once you believe the carrots are big enough for your use, they are ready to harvest.

Before careful when you pull them out of the ground, if it is a little tough to pull them up you can use a fork to help break up the soil around them.

Jenny started growing vegetables from her home and has really enjoyed it. She gets all her gardening equipment from http://www.gardenhealth.com/

My snowy garden

by Tricia

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Well I can’t say that my garden looks like that much right now, but some of the plants that have a dusting of snow look lovely.

The snow dusted branches above are from my rose Theresa Bugnet. It’s a very hardy rugosa type rose. It’s branches turn a deep crimson red in the winter and as you can see it looks lovely after a snow storm.

Dwarf Mugo Pine covered in snow

We have three dwarf mugo pine in the front walk between our neighbors house and ours (we live in a semi-detached house) and when it snows they get a lovely coating of snow too that stays on their branches often for a few days.

Can you tell that it snowed over the weekend?

Do you have photos of your garden in the off season? Perhaps snow covered plants or frosted flowers?

BTW my post is a bit late today because our internet and cable went down late last night and didn’t come back on again until an hour or two ago! Grrrr

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Rows and Rows of Liatris flowers

by Tricia

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This weeks theme is Rows

When you take a close look at many flowers or leaves you can see that there’s often a pattern to how it’s been formed.

I mean, take this Liatris stalk. When it’s in full bloom it just looks like a puffy floral stalk in the garden, but when you look a little more closely you’ll notice that the stalk is composed of many flower buds in tight rows. Each stalk must have at least 50 flowers on it.

I can’t remember if this Liatris was about to bloom or if it’s blooms were fading when I took this photo, I believe it was finishing up it’s bloom.

I have several clumps of Liatris throughout the garden. I plant five to 15 bulbs or corms (I can’t remember which they are at the moment) in a circular pattern so that when the individual plants grow they form a natural looking clump.

I’ve only been growing Liatris (Gay Feather) for a few years and I haven’t yet noticed if any of the bulbs have naturalized to produce more plants. Does anyone know if they naturalize?