By Wendell Owens
I remember my Mom running her garden tool through the garden. It had a blade on it, and it would cut off the roots of the weeds. It was very handy, but you could only run it in the rows and not between the plants. That’s where I came in; I was the weeder between the plants.
Carrots were the worst. When the two blades of the carrots poked through the ground, that was when they needed to be weeded. It was hard to tell the difference between the carrots and the grass. I didn’t like that job. I still have that gardening tool of my mother’s just to remind me of my Mom and her gardening days. We had one acre of garden and we lived off the farm.
Nutritional Supports for Carrots
While the nutritional requirements of most plants change from the beginning to end of their life cycle, nutritional supports for carrots should be kept in the seed producing mode all throughout their life cycle. Usually produce goes from growth-producing to seed-producing and back to growth-producing, which bulks the produce.
But carrots are the only plants that should remain in the seed producing mode for their lifetime. This means that you would not use products like Amaze, which is a bulker, but you would use trace mineral products to fertilize carrots such as WayAhead 7X. You can read more about WayAhead 7X on our website, or simply give me a call at 507-235-6909 if you have any questions.
At one time I raised carrots for the local canning company. I had 45 acres of carrots, and, of course, I sprayed them with herbicide as directed by the local canning company. The local canning company didn’t want any weeds to interfere with the harvesting equipment. It took me thirty days just to harvest the carrots. It was a very slow process requiring several passes through the field to cut the tops, dig the carrots, and clean the carrots. Needless to say, I only raised them one year.
