Growing Greens
If you’d like to grow the pretty, lacy greens of the carrot plant, for decoration or for eating, it’s an easy process. You can use the tops cut from your carrots to do this, and end up with a supply of carrot greens for your kitchen, or with lacy green adornments for your home.
Once you’ve cut the tops of your carrots off when preparing to cook them, simply take those ends and set them in a dish or other container, add a little water, and wait for them to grow. There are other methods for doing this, such as using newspaper as a growing medium; none of those methods is difficult.
Growing Carrot Seeds
As a biennial plant, carrots will not produce seed until they’ve grown for a full year; in the second year of a carrot’s life, flowers and seeds will appear and can be used to grow more carrots. All you really need to do for this to happen is to leave some of your carrots unharvested.
When the end of the growing season is upon you and all of your carrots have been harvested, you can choose to leave some of your carrots in the ground. In addition to keeping your carrots fresh and available for pulling, leaving some carrots behind will allow them to bolt, going to flower and then to seed.
There is a small amount of preparation you’ll need to do in order to prepare you carrots for the winter.
- Weed your garden well; this will help keep them from getting a stronger foothold in your garden.
- Lay down a heavy mulch of leaves or straw to protect your plants; press the mulch firmly over the plants.
- If you live in an area with warm winters, check occasionally to see if watering is needed.
- Wait patiently; come spring, your carrots will flower, and then go to seed.
Once the carrot flowers begin to dry out and release their seeds, harvest them carefully and plant at the appropriate time. By allowing a few carrot plants to bolt each year, you can propagate these delicious vegetables indefinitely.
