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Carrots too young to seed?

22 Dec
One of my dragon carrot’s has gone to seed. It’s shot up a 1.5m stalk and has about 6 clumps of flowers growing on it. Logic tell’s me to wait till the flowers / seeds start turning brown and chop them off the plant.
However I did a bit of digging around and strangely enough carrot’s are biennial and therefore aren’t supposed to seed till the 2nd year of their life?? These carrot’s are only 6months old so not sure what’s happening. Perhaps because their an heirloom variety they seed early? I can’t find any information specifically for Dragon Carrots.

Many sites I checked out suggested that you should only save the seeds from the first 2 flowers to sprout as these will produce the biggest and best carrots. Also to ensure genetic diversity, and good produce, you should collect from 40 or so different carrots. That’s going to be hard given I only have about 10 in the ground and I want to EAT them. Which does ask the question, what happens to the carrot when it goes to seed? Can I still dig it up and eat it? Does it lose flavour / color / shape?

I’ll post more as I know.!

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Why Dragon Carrots?

19 Dec

Over the few years I’ve been gardening more and more. It started with a container herb patch, morphed into an attempt to Bonsai various plants and ending up where I am now with a patch of dirt on body corporate land in the unlikely place between a swimming pool and Sydney Harbour.

This is my first real garden and I’ve probably jumped into rather quickly. I looked up companion planting but when it came down to it I still planted creeping plants (rockmelon, zuchinni, mint etc) next to carrots and tomatos. But it’s all a learning process and that what this blog is about. My garden, what i’ve got, how I’ve done it and as much information about the various bits as I can research and pass on.

The title Dragon Carrots come from a type of carrot of the same name. It’s a purple carrot. Did you know that originally, before selective breeding became all the rage, carrots were purple, white and Orange. It wasn’t until the orange carrots were selectively bred in revenance to the House of Orange in the Netherlands. I stumbled across this breed recently while looking for some more unusal heirloom varieties and they represent my first harvest so seemed appropriate.

On top of that, just this morning I was sent a post from the University of Southern Queensland that purple carrots are being postitioned as the next supervegetable. The results seen from feeding purple carrot juice to overwieght “western diet” fed rats in quite remarkable. It quotes that compared to your regular orange carrots “purple carrots have up to 28 times more anthocyanins, the antioxidant that creates the purple-red pigment in blueberries and raspberries, among other foods.”

So combine the two references and you have the Dragon Carrot blog. Hope you enjoy it.