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rainbowgardener
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carrots, oh my! now what?

I let a couple carrots flower and go to seed last year. Now that bed is full of thousands of baby carrots all jammed together. I have no idea how I will be able to thin them!

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jal_ut
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Digging fork? Turn the bed. Now plant what you want.

Bobberman
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Make new close rows through the bed and plant something like onions or lettuce and leave like 9 inches of carrots in their own long bed row so even though they are close they will grow and you can thin as they get bigger. This way you will not have to get rid of all of them.

imafan26
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That happened to me too. Only the ones on the outside sized up nicely, many I pulled as baby carrots, but I should have pulled more.

It is a lovely flower though and it does attract beneficial insects so it was not a total loss.

Some of the carrots I missed started growing again.

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rainbowgardener
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Yes, I always leave some parsley to flower for the beneficial insects. The parsley doesn't seem to self seed so aggressively.

I wanted to see if carrots would come back and I'm glad to have them, I just wasn't expecting so many! :) It will take a lot of thinning and hard to do with them so tight together. I probably will start by just digging out some spaces so that I am left with spaced out clumps of carrots and then I can gradually work on thinning the clumps as the plants get a little bigger.

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applestar
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That sounds like a good plan. Use tools like horihori I knife... Or skinny trowel to dig out clumps that you could just plant as clumps in another location -- and you could thin those and the clumps you left behind later. :D

CharlieBear
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you can simply cut off some of them rather than pull them. If you want carrots of any size they need to be no closer than 2" apart. Personally I would get rid of them, because regrowing them in the same place isn't the best idea and encourages disease. Generally, with carrots 3 year rotation is best. That is why I built 3 carrot beds as my ground in the garden is not well suited to carrots.

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GardeningCook
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Take a tip from the golden oldie gardening guru Dick Raymond.

Using a regular straight metal rake, just draw that baby right across your thick bed of carrots a couple of times. Whatever's left will do carrots proud. It's painful at the moment, but the results along with the lack of having to do hand-thinning, will make you smile. Been there, done that. :)



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