Carrots — the ‘healthy’ one

Press, 15 September 1976, Page 12

Carrots — the ‘healthy’ one

Carrots are wholesome, highly nutritious and perhaps the most health-giving of all vegetables. No home garden should be without them. There are several varieties from which to choose and doubtless many gardeners will already have some tried and trusted favourites — egmont gold, topweight and the like. But one type which all

home gardeners should try is the little finger carrot. There are several reasons for using this variety, just two of which are ease of growing and economy of space in the garden. As the name implies the little finger carrot is a good deal smaller than most other varieties and is essentially a baby carrot designed for cooking whole or eating raw without the need for shredding or cutting. The idea of a baby carrot is not new and many commercial growers make a practice of harvesting

immature carrots of other varieties for marketing as “new” or “baby” carrots. But the difficulty here is that quite often the quality of these suffer, purely because they are immature. This is not the case with the little finger strain which is bred specifically for the purpose of producing very early, high quality colour and flavour. In terms of economics, this strain is also to be recommended. With normal carrot sowing, the seedlings needed to be thinned out to allow between one to two inches between each.

This does not apply to little fingers because their growing characteristics mean they do not require nearly so much room as, say, the topweight variety which reaches a size of around Bin. Therefore, all the seeds which germinate can be left in and they can also cover an entire area of, say, one metre square and need not be planted in rows. This uses all the available space which is an important aspect of home gardening. The carrot fly, slugs, snails and wire worms, all take their toll of carrots. The gnib of the carrot fly is particularly destructive.