Did you know carrot tops can grow new carrots? This is not a drill.
One of my fears about an apocalypse was wondering what I’d do for nutricious produce if:
1. Grocery stores as we know them collapsed.
2. All the seed collections were damaged/ruined/unreachable in a STHF situation.
One thing I’ve learned about farming is this: Nothing is certain, and nothing is ever guaranteed. A lot of it is trial and error, and a lot of it can be frustrating if you do not learn from your mistakes, keep log of what works and how/when/why, and take everything else with a grain of salt. For me, propagating produce like carrots has been a purely touch-and-go experience. I live in an overly humid climate where we get more sunny days than not, and I have easy access to water. Depending on your geographical area and personal resources, some things may work differently for you. When trying new things, all I can say is you never know if you don’t try at all!
The idea here is relatively simple: When you take whole carrots and use them for recipes, you cut the tops off, right? So, two things you can do with these — either take them to your worm compost bin (Homemade Backyard Worm Compost Bin, check it out), OR you can take the tops and put them upright in a shallow bowl of water like you see here and let them sit. That’s it! I have mine near a window that gets a few hour of daylight, and after about 2 days you begin to see the green sprouts coming out of the top like little hairs. I usually wait until the green is semi-bushy resembling a Chia Pet, and clearly evident that it is in fact growing and not molding. At that point, you can transfer and bury the carrots up to a little above covering the orange, and let them do their thing for a few weeks with occasional watering until they pop back up ready to harvest. Et voila! That’s the mystery of propagating carrots solved.
If you’re wondering about the little brown seeds around the carrots, allow me to explain: As I was dicing up an apple for my sweet-tooth snack (recipe to come.. stay tuned!), I decided to play around with my apple seeds and see what happened when soaking them. Usually a soaked seed will sprout, and I’ve only seen one seed sprout a white tail so far but I haven’t lost hope. If nothing else, it’s a free experiment to try out. Even if I can get the apple seeds to sprout and plant them, there’s a chance they wouldn’t grow properly (climate, soil, etc) or bear any fruit (there’s much more to the farming process being successful than planting seeds and watering). In the interim, I left out my apple core rinds to dry out, and those eventually will go back out to the worm compost.
That little blurb on carrots will conclude our short farming lesson for the day. So far, this has been a successful method for yielding more carrots. The only other produce I’ve attempted this with was a citronella plant. If anyone decides to give this a go in their backyard, I’d love to hear about your results!
Happy Dirt Therapy.
Leave a Reply