Welcome to jACKrABBIT! Here you can buy seeds for growing your own produce and ingredients for cooking and baking, you can find recipes for everyday and for preserving home-grown food and find activities and ideas for getting you and your children out of doors and enjoying nature. We also sell native wildflower seeds to encourage those important bees and butterflies into your garden.

'Grow Your Own' Carrots*

Carrots are a root vegetable that come in two types, early and maincrop, and within these types you can get long-rooted or stump-rooted shapes. Carrots do not like stoney soil, as it damages the roots, so the shorter stump-rooted kind can help to get round this problem, though you get less carrot for your money. It is best to grow long-rooted varieties in containers with good soil and compost.

CHANTENAY RED CORED 2, Early crop
This earlier maturing carrot is an older variety with a good texture, sweet flavour, and is popular for harvesting at the baby carrot stage. It is a good crop for limited space, as you can achieve 900 plants per metre squared. This also makes it an ideal crop for containers. Grows to about 8 cm. To store Chantenay, see below.
£1.39 per pack (app. 2000 seeds)

AUTUMN KING 2, Maincrop
This is a larger variety, growing up to 30cm, and has won the RHS award for Garden Merit. It is also good for storing (see bottom of post).
£1.49 per pack (app. 2000 seeds)






GROW CARROTS
Preparation
Choose a stone free area
Sowing
These are general sowing times and there may be slight differences between varieties, full instruction are on individual packets.
Outdoor sowing: early crop Mar-Jun
The smell of carrots can attract carrot fly when pulled from the ground, so sow thinly so there is no need for thinning later. If you do need to thin, do so in the late evening. Wait till the soil is warming as carrots need a temperature of about 7 C to germinate. Sow 1.5cm deep in rows 15cm apart. Sow every three to four weeks for a regular harvest.
Care and Harvesting
Keep the weeds down completey around your carrots, and keep the ground moist (otherwise the roots can sometimes split). Carrot fly can be a major pest, ruining a crop. To prevent them cover your carrot plants with horticultural fleece, making sure that there are no access points for the flies. You can also confuse the flies by interplanting carrots with stronger smelling crops such as onions. Maincrop varieties can be sown in the early summer to avoid the egg laying period.
Carrots will be ready for harvesting after about 10-12 weeks for early varieties and 16 weeks for maincrop. Harvest as soon as they are ready; you can also harvest baby carrots earlier, which have a sweet flavour.
TO STORE: Leave the roots that you want to store in the ground till October, then dig up carefully and choose undamaged roots. Trim the leaves off and then pack into boxes of sand, and store in a cool, frost-free place, where they should keep through to spring.
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