Unthinned Carrot Bed Harvest

Dateline: 15 October 2016

In This Previous Blog Post I showed the carrot harvest I got from two experimental 18" diameter garden beds. The carrots were large and straight, and it was a satisfying harvest. But I actually planted four of those 18" beds with carrots. They were all tri-planted and covered with shade discs as I explain in my Idea Book For Gardeners, but in two of the beds I did not thin the tri-planted pinches of  carrot seeds. 

If the tri-plantings are not thinned to three individual plants, a lot more carrots will grow, and they will be smaller (and not so straight). But the unthinned carrot beds were not a total loss, as the pictures on this blog post show.

The carrots you see in the picture at the top of this page were pulled from one of my unthinned 18" diameter beds. They may look big in that picture, but they're not. The picture below shows the total yield in a 9" diameter colander.

Those carrots taste just fine. And they're sized just right for dipping.

The other unthinned 18" diameter carrot bed was planted later than the one above, and the carrots were even smaller. The pictures below show the yield from this later-planted bed (in the same 9" colander)...

The yield of beautiful, large, straight carrots from the two thinned and mulched carrot beds was 9.5 pounds (from approximately 30 carrots). 

The yield from the two unthinned  (and unmulched) carrot beds shown here was 4.5 pounds. I didn't count the number of mini carrots but would guess it was around 100. 

All carrots were washed, put into plastic bags, and the bags were pierced with multiple knife-pokes to provide ventilation. Thus packaged, they will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator.