Carrot Seeds
Grow Your Own Carrot Seeds? Not All That Easy
Have you ever wondered where carrot seeds come from? We normally only see them in packets that come from the store, as if they were born there, but we never see them in the garden.
The answer is, the carrot is a biennial which happens to be grown as an annual. A biennial normally establishes its root system in its first year, and then produces blooms and seeds, the second year. So, if you want to grow your own carrot seeds, you need to leave plants in the ground for next year. By the way, another biennial, grown as an annual, is the cabbage.
So now you've waited a full year, and can harvest your seeds. Then you wait for the following year, at which time you plant the seeds. Now you can sit back and wait for your seeds to sprout and your crop to grow. You might sit there for quite awhile, as nothing is likely to happen. The problem is, the seeds you purchased from the store are almost always F1 hybrids, and the seeds from the plants they produce will be sterile.
In the production and marketing of carrot seeds, the grower will produce seeds that have two different parents; this is designed to provide you with a crop of excellent carrots. Each parent has some particularly nice characteristic about it, and the other parent has a different nice characteristic. The grower wants to produce a carrot which has both characteristics. So the grower will use the pollen from one of the parent's plants, to fertilize the flowers of the other parent's plants. The result, a crop of carrot seeds which, when planted, will produce carrots having the characteristics of both parents.
The problem is, as we said earlier, the carrots produced are hybrids, and the seeds of hybrids are sterile. It's a bit like crossing a donkey with a horse to get a mule, a very valuable animal indeed, but also a very sterile animal.
So you will be much better off buying your seeds from the supermarket or seed store, just as you did last year. Unless of course, you want to get in the business of producing your own hybrid carrots. There's nothing wrong with that of course, it just sounds like lots of work. If you check the packages your garden seeds come in, you'll find that there are other vegetables in your garden that are also hybrids, some varieties of tomato for example.
Carrots by the way, are exceedingly easy to grow, they are among the more nutritious members of the vegetable family, and kids usually like them. Except for an occasional problem with wire worms in some areas, carrots are generally pest free. Like any vegetable, they thrive in full sun, as long as they are given adequate moisture. Since the root usually grows anywhere from 3 or 4 inches to a foot, you want to plant carrot seeds in well-prepared, loose soil. By the second thinning, you can usually start eating the roots.
So the message is, grow carrots, but let someone else worry about producing the seeds.