Onions and carrots are the most common and friendly crops in our dachas. The best solution is to plant them side by side or even together. So they can help each other: carrots will drive away the smell of Napomyza gymnostoma tops, and onions will protect their neighbor from various pests with their phytoncides.
Preparation of seed
I never soak or process the seeds before sowing, because this is not provided for by nature. Have you ever seen nature do anything to seeds? She just sows them dry in moist soil, and that’s it. Why don’t we learn from her? Let’s do the same!
In order not to thin out carrots in the future (as well as other plants with small seed material) and not to feed it, you need to take 1 teaspoon of seeds, any mineral fertilizer of the powder fraction (except potassium chloride) and half a Cup of fine sifted sand. Instead of the latter, you can use the dust from drunk tea or coffee. Mix everything thoroughly — and sow as if you were salting the prepared furrow with this mixture. Next, the soil should be leveled and pressed with a Board or slap with your hands.
Crop
The bed should be released from the shelter the night before and well moistened and covered again. In the morning, we make grooves for sowing with the edge of the Board, placing them in the North — South direction at a distance of only 5 cm from each other.
First of all, we sow marigold seeds along the perimeter of the bed, then sow carrot seeds from each edge of 3 grooves, and the center of the bed — seeds of annual onions. In an unsuccessful year for growing onions, the bulbs will be small, but this is not a big deal: you just grow a large seedling (the so-called sample) and use it as a planting material for the next year.
But there is one subtlety. The flower arrow is not set in the seed, but in the selection — Yes. This means that when freezing, such planting material will show color, without giving bulbs. The same will happen when storing onions at a temperature of +10…+18°C. Therefore, it will need to be either stored in storage (where it is usually +4°C), or kept at a temperature of +20°C and above. Therefore, the atmosphere of the living room for storing onions and garlic is optimal.
Keep an eye on the weather or immediately cover the plantings with double lutrasil — or plant in early June, when the frost is guaranteed to end. Instead of sowing, you can sow Nigella of any onion variety to get your own sowing. In the summer, you will gradually choose to eat grown plants, thinning evenly so that you leave a 10×10 cm planting pattern.
Attention! Carrots when applied when planting ash becomes “multi-tailed”. The same thing will happen when feeding with excessive doses of nitrogen.
Care
It will be good to cover the entire sown bed immediately with lutrasil, giving some freedom for growth, and fix it on the bed. Remove the shelter should be after the end of cherry blossom, when the spring pest season is over. Since marigolds are not very cold-resistant plants, when hiding a bed of lutrasil along its edges, you need to put it in two layers, bending it. Sometimes, in dry or very windy weather, you will have to water the garden bed until the seedlings appear. Do this directly on the covering material. In the Northern regions, such weather occurs at the very beginning of may — and even at the end of April, but rarely.
You don’t need to feed carrots during the summer, and you don’t need to water them. Moreover, with such sowing, there is no need for thinning. All you have to do is come back for carrots when you need them.
Re-cover the bed with lutrasil during the second summer of vegetable pests. For the Northern regions — around the middle of July, as soon as the Pieridae began to appear. And no longer remove the shelter before cleaning — just lift its edge to take out a couple of root vegetables for food.
But you can not cover, because the sharp smell of marigolds fools the head of pests, and they, fearing to leave their offspring without food, fly to where the aroma of the feeding plant is not mixed with some suspicious and extraneous. In order not to attract harmful insects, never leave carrot tops directly on the garden bed, because when it withers, the smell increases — this is what attracts pests from all over the area.
Since carrots are sown not deep, but only 1.5 cm, when they grow, they stick out of the soil, turn green and lose their taste qualities. You have to rake up the ground to the root crops or sow non-green varieties. Carrots should be removed after the first freeze, because it must pass the stage of natural cooling. If you are forced to harvest carrots earlier, be sure to leave it in the refrigerator for a day, otherwise the aboveground part will continue to grow, and the root crop will wither.
After harvesting, the vacant bed should be immediately covered with a light-proof material before planting winter garlic.
On a note. There are several varieties of carrots that differ in shape, size, color, and sugar content. It’s like ‘Parisian carrots’, ‘Amsterdam’, ‘Nantes’, ‘Santana’. And each of these varieties has a huge number of varieties and hybrids.
Best time for sowing carrots
For the middle zone, the best sowing period is the end of April or the beginning of may. In regions with a continental climate, it can be sown in the winter. In the same place, where thaws often occur in winter, it is better to sow carrots in March, organizing beds for sowing in the fall. To do this, sweep away the snow in March, water the prepared furrows with a hot stream of water from the kettle, sow seeds in them, sprinkle with dry sand or soil stored in the room since autumn, again throw snow on the bed — and that’s it!
In April, carrots can be sown at a temperature of +5°C and even lower. However, the best temperature for seedlings is +10…+12°C, despite the fact that carrot seeds (like all cold-resistant crops) are hatched at +4°C, and germinate at +6°C.
Early crops of carrots and, on the contrary, of late (in early June in Northern regions) allow escape from psyllids. But if the temperature exceeds +22°C at this time, the development of carrots will be slowed down, and the root crop will form rough.
How to store carrots
If there is a cellar, then — interspersed with dry sand or peat — in boxes. If there are not many carrots or you are growing them for a small child, you can store them in a box on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator in sphagnum moss. Before laying in the cellar, carrots are not washed, and when kept in the refrigerator, root vegetables should be washed and dried (only not in the sun). The tops are cut off, leaving about 1.5 cm.
You can’t store carrots together with apples, which release ethylene gas that can impair its taste. For adult family members, carrots are best dried, canned, or frozen. The fact is that even when stored in a cellar or refrigerator, it retains vitamins and useful properties only until the end of February or early March. Then the root crop dies, and mycotoxins are formed in it, which are harmful to our body. Eating old carrots, you poison your body with them. This is especially undesirable for young children. Dried, frozen or canned carrots naturally do not produce any toxins, and they can be consumed before the new harvest.
It would seem that onions and carrots are the simplest vegetables in our gardens, but there are many features and tricks in caring for them that you need to know to get an excellent harvest.
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