Carrot Seed Starting and Growing with Little Work

I love homegrown carrots. Store-bought just can’t compare. (Even organic.)

A homegrown carrot is so….carroty.

They are crunchy, sweet, and have such a strong carrot flavor you’ll realize store-bought carrots are tasteless.

However, I HATE growing carrots.

They have to be babied.

They have to be planted just deep enough.

The seeds have to be watered. Regularly. Multiple times a day. For what feels like weeks on end. Just to get them to sprout.

If they dry out, they’re goners.

Many gardeners get around this by covering their carrot seeds with wood or burlap.

However, if you forget to take the wood off soon enough, they’ll die. If you forget to take the burlap off the second they sprout, you risk pulling up those precious baby seedlings you’ve worked so hard to start. And even if they don’t, you still have to water them several times a day if you live in a dry climate.

It’s enough to make a girl not want to grow carrots anymore.

Until this past year, that is. I’ve discovered the best way of starting carrot seeds yet. Very little work. Very little time involved. Just plant the seeds and let nature do its thing.

Winter Planting Carrots

I planted last year’s carrot seeds in March. (Yes, March at 7300 ft in CO!) That’s it! I planted them, and then did nothing but occasionally water them when the rains dried up. Well, I also put some mulch on them once they were big enough.

In case you’re not from Colorado, just know that at 7300 ft in our location it’s winter until pretty much June. A couple years ago we had a blizzard on June 9th!

To top it all off, I decided to leave them in the ground for the following winter with a thick layer of mulch instead of preserving them. I don’t have a root cellar, and neither my husband or I are a fan of frozen or canned carrots.

It worked like a dream! Look at these pretty orange carrots I harvested on February 20th. They are still sweet, crunchy, and good to eat. Out of all the carrots I’ve harvested over the past 11 months, only one was bad inside.

The only reason I finished harvesting them that week is because we’ve had a few nice days and felt like getting in some gardening. In fact, I just planted this next summer’s carrot crop as soon as I finished harvesting last summer’s.

How I Did It (And How You Can Do It Too)

Last year, when I decided to try this experiment, we had a huge snowstorm in the forecast. I knew this would help to cover the seeds and keep any birds from eating them.

It ended up dumping almost three feet of snow in one giant drift in my garden. Yep, there’s a garden under there somewhere!

Before the storm hit, I went out and pulled back the mulch in one of my beds. Then, I broadcast carrot, turnip, rutabaga, beet, kale, and lettuce seeds over the entire area. After that, I simply raked the seeds in lightly.

If you like nice tidy rows of vegetables, this method is probably not for you.

If you want neat rows, check out this post on making your own carrot seed tape.

Sometime around May, the seeds started sprouting.

I wish I could tell you exactly when. However, I failed massively at my homestead/garden journal for last growing season.

The carrots started in this way grew much better than the carrots I tried to start in tidy rows in the spring. In fact, all the seeds, except the beets, grew really well this way.

Nature doesn’t wait until the conditions are perfect for germination. Plants put on seed heads in the late summer and autumn, then seeds fall to the ground throughout late fall and winter. The snow, along with cycles of freezing and thawing, gets the seeds ready to germinate as soon as conditions are right in the spring.

I may try planting my sunflowers this way as well. The volunteer ones always pop up before I plant my main crop.

Have you experimented with winter sowing spring crops in the garden? If so, I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments!