Cynthia: There is nothing quite as good as a sweet garden carrot.

Farmer Ty is from Keep It Real Vegetables.

And rumor has it he grows the best carrots.

And I am here to get all the juicy secrets from our friend Ty.

(upbeat music) Okay, Tyler, it is April.

So we have April, May, June.

End of July, you're gonna be harvesting all these beauties.

I can't wait to see that.

Give us a little bit of tip on when you start planting carrots because you go to farmer's markets and sell your goods also to restaurants.

You're obviously not just planting one crop and done.

You're doing some succession planting.

So tell me when you start and how you keep it going.

- So we typically plant our spring crop in, you know, end of April, early May.

And we start harvesting that June usually.

And then we plant another fall carrot rotation.

We plant that in July and we start harvesting that in you know, August, September.

- I wanna ask Tyler, I have my personal opinion, but curious your preference, do you like summer carrots or do you like fall carrots more?

- Typically, younger carrots are gonna be a little sweeter but there is a difference between the late fall carrots.

So once it starts freezing the starches in the carrots convert into sugars because sugar has a lower freezing point.

So the carrots do that to protect themselves but the byproduct is you get sweeter carrots.

So it is true that the late fall and what people call winter carrots typically do have a higher sugar content.

(upbeat music) - You also said something very important that I want people to remember because I know I have so many people that have a hard time harvesting something when it's ready.

Like you said, the young, tender carrots that you get in the summer, sometimes people just wanna wait because they think it's gonna get bigger but that doesn't necessarily mean better.

- No.

Yeah, if you leave carrots in the ground and they get really big, they're gonna be a little tougher, they're not gonna have as much sugar content.

They're still edible.

They're good for things like soups or stews or if you're gonna cook the carrots but for fresh eating, you probably want a younger carrot.

- Okay.

So don't wait.

Pick your carrot.

- And carrots are edible as soon as they are big enough for you to eat.

So they could even be little tiny baby carrots.

Carrots are edible at all life stages.

(upbeat music) - We know that the secret to any good vegetable garden is all in the soil.

So tell me what you do to amend your soil to make it that beautiful, perfect loaminess that those carrots love to grow in.

- So in the fall, we clear out all the foliage from the previous season we weeded and then we lay down the secret weapon, which is some high quality finished compost.

- Tell me about high finished quality compost.

- Well, some people use, - It's not your backyard compost?

- We're on a scale where it's hard for us to make enough of that.

So I purchase high quality finished compost.

And what that means basically is that it's not like manure, it's not in the process of breaking down.

It's already broken down and in a place where it's ready to go.

So it's a little more expensive, but we find that that is well worth the cost of it and really kind of our secret weapon.

- So you have that beautiful finished compost and you put it in the ground.

How do you exactly put it in the ground?

- Just put it in a wheelbarrow and shovel it out onto the beds.

And then we use a bed prep rack to get it real nice and smooth.

And then we just let it sink in over the winter, let the snow and the rain kind of filter it in so that by springtime it's nicely incorporated and the beds are ready to plant.

- Awesome.

- We practice no-till, which we've noticed has really upped our soil health our yield.

That's part of our soil secret as well.

(upbeat music) - Some people think that you have to have sandy soil to grow your carrots but that's not the case.

You're looking for a loamy soil.

So tell us a little bit more about that.

- Right.

Well, you can grow carrots in any type of soil.

In fact, carrots really like clay soil.

The issue just is that, the heavier the soil, the harder it is to get the carrots out.

Also, if it's really rocky, heavy soil sometimes the carrots grow kind of misshapen because they have to navigate the rocks in the heavy soil.

So some people think that a sandy soil like, or like a sandy loam, like this soil is ideal because it is easier to dig the carrots out of.

This soil here is very sandy.

I've been building it up over the past decade plus with compost.

So now, I would categorize this as like a sandy loam.

You do want organic matter in the sand or else the sand kind of is not very fertile, doesn't hold water very well.

So this kind of soil many people would consider to be ideal.

But you can grow carrots in any soil.

- Yeah.

Well, it looks absolutely beautiful.

Footloose.

Footloose.

(upbeat music) So Tyler, tell me, do you always plant from seed?

Yes.

- Carrots do not transplant well.

- So every time you see people that are trying to sell you carrot starts, that's not what you wanna do.

- I would recommend against that, yeah.

- Okay.

Tell me why - They just don't transplant well.

They're a root crop.

They like to grow in place from seed.

I've actually never seen carrot transplants, so I don't know that could work.

But typically across the board most carrot growers grow from seed.

- What about your favorite variety?

I have my personal opinion, but I wanna know what your favorite variety is.

- I like to grow a wide variety of carrots.

We're kind of known for our rainbow carrots.

So I have many varieties I like.

The universal standard for that works amazingly in our area, really hearty, makes really delicious, beautiful sweet carrots is Scarlet Nantes, and that's a orange carrot variety that's readily available everywhere.

I also buy a lot of seed from Johnny's Seeds in Maine.

They have a variety called Rainbow that is actually one variety of carrot that makes multiple different colors.

If you wanna plant rainbow carrots it's better to buy several different varieties and plant them separately because different carrots have different growth habits.

So I would avoid any carrots that's proclaimed to be rainbow carrots.

Most of those are just different varieties mixed together into the same packet, which you wanna avoid because the different varieties have different growth habits.

- Okay.

Tyler, let's get planting.

I wanna see how you're gonna put these in the ground and how you sow them by hand.

- Okay.

So yes, before I got fancy seeders, I did a lot of carrot seeding by hand.

- I can't believe you did that.

- There's some nuance to it.

The main thing you wanna watch for is overs seeding because carrot seeds are very small.

So, as you're seeding them, you might think, I'm not putting down enough seed, but if you plant them too densely, then you're gonna have to thin them or you'll never get a full-sized carrot.

- That sounds awful.

I think another issue we may run into is wind.

- So yeah, when it's not windy, you can drop the carrot seeds from a higher distance and not hurt your back.

But on a day like today, you might kind of have to get right to the furrow and drop the seeds directly into the furrow so that they don't blow away.

- Okay, perfect.

All right, let's go.

- Okay.

So I use drip tape.

So I do one line of carrots right up against the drip tape on either side.

You can get away with a line in the middle as well but typically just one line of carrots on the side of drip tape.

If you're not using drip tape and you have overhead, you can even just scatter the seeds.

But I like to grow them in a furrow so that I can see where they're supposed to be and weeded around them.

So when I'm doing it by hand I just get a long handled tool like this.

any tool will do, and I just draw a line against the drip tape like so.

And like I said, you can do one on each side like this.

And you don't wanna go very deep.

The carrot seeds mainly just want to be like quarter to half an inch deep.

And then you get your carrot seed.

This is a special variety of carrot that's a French heirloom carrot that is not widely available but it's kind of one of our signature carrots.

I have this bag in one hand and then I just get a pinch at a time and I kind of just sprinkle.

And again, you wanna go real light.

You want to shoot for one seed every quarter inch or so.

So not much.

So about like that.

- Okay.

- And then I come back and just smooth over the soil.

You really don't want the carrot seeds to be very deep.

And then sometimes I'll give them like a little pat down and that's it.

And then the key to getting them to germinate, they take a long time to germinate like up to 10 to 15 days.

So that's kind of one of the tricky things is, you need to keep them moist consistently that whole time.

So I would recommend watering once a day just to keep that soil bed moist until they start sprouting.

- Do you put a cover down to help with moisture retention or especially in July, do you put something down to cover it?

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

So I will use row cover fabric or shade cloth.

Some people put like, even put like boards over it until they start germinating and then remove the boards.

But yes, especially in our dry desert climate, you do.

It helps a lot to have something on the surface of the soil to hold in that moisture a little bit better.

- This was such a fantastic moment.

Thank you so much for teaching us all your secrets on growing the most beautiful carrots here in Salt Lake.

We're so excited.

I hope you guys enjoyed this episode.

Make sure to subscribe and we'll get you next time.

(cheerful music)