Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: mickeyboy on July 07, 2010, 08:21
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Hi there, i have planted a good healthy looking couple of rows of early nantes carrots and for the second year now they taste really bitter and to be honest not vey nice!! :( :(
Can anyone tell me as to why this is as its rather annoying and very dissapointing......
Cheers
Mickeyboy
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I find that any bitterness in carrots is in the skin. However you are peeling them - aren't you?
Gillie
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I'd be interested too as my cheffy OH has noticed this in the past and he peels them and needed to add load of sugar to the water they are cooked in.
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I know this goes against what all the books tell you, but we always manure our carrot patch - not heavily, but just enough - and we've always had very sweet carrots which are not forked or hairy. In fact, we have people asking if we did add sugar to our carrots, and we never do. By doing this, we find all shop carrots quite bitter in comparison.
Chicken manure is a bit strong so we get aged cow manure for the carrot patch and add some in the fall every year. Rabbit manure would work well also. Carrots, like every other crop, need 'food' to grow and taste good, and manure gives the best results. I can always tell the difference between a chemically fertilized one and a manured one.
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Trillium - do you lay the manure on the surface or dig it in?
PS - like your "rainy days" saying!
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I always rotovate the manure into the ground in fall as it's usually fresh then so has the winter to mellow. If I didn't, the dogs would always be playing in it >:( By rotovating or digging it in, there's food for the carrot roots to grow down toward along with moisture. I also add loads of shredded dried leaves every fall to build my clay soil and I'm sure that adds to the flavour as I get worms galore.
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Now that is a strange thing. ::)
I grow Early Nantes and they are lovely and sweet. I never peel them, just scrub with a brush.
I cover my plots with well rotted cow muck in the autumn just like Trillium but unlike Trillium i leave it on the surface until spring and rotovate it in then. :)
[must confess, i can not tell a lie, its OH who does the muck spreading :D I just tell him where to put it :D]
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I've given up on carrots for the very same reason. I even tried leaving them longer as I read something about the sugar forming...........but to no avail. I'm saying this very quietly but I prefer the shop bought ones.
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I've grown lots of different varieties and never yet found a bitter one but like some of the others I keep a very fertile soil. The early Nantes this year have been very sweet. Straight from the ground with just the soil rinsed off under the tap they are like crunchy lollipops. :)
There must be something in your soil that's causing the bitterness.
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No idea why, but I've got early Nantes and they're exactly the same. If you eat them raw, straight out of the ground, the bitter taste really lingers in your mouth. I wonder if they're not properly matured in some way, or lacking something because of the dry conditions?
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Yes, dryness does factor into the taste (or lack of). If you're in a dry spell, it does help to give the carrots some water, preferably as late in the day as possible so it has time to sink down. Do this every few days. today I picked some thinnings - Touchon and a hybrid variety that I got free seeds for with John's book. Lovely.
Sandy soils will dry out faster and would need more frequent watering. Also, frost will help sweeten carrots. They need just the first light frost which also chills them for storage.
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it was manured the year before and i always mix a little growmore into the beds before planting. I water regularly as they are in quite sandy soil in 1 metre raised beds so do have a tendancy to dry out. However i also had this problem last year and the year before and i alternate the beds. The carrots look really healthy and are becoming a nice size, but taste horrid!!
Thanks all for the response, but cant seem to find a suitable answer so am tempted just to stop growing them, it is extremly frustrating >:( >:(
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It is strange, i cant think why some are bitter. Is it just Early Nantes :unsure:
I have the same thing with Little Gem lettuce. Everyone else seems to find them really sweet but they are awful grown here. So bitter they make your eyes water. Can grow other lettuces fine, its just Little Gem. So like you with the carrots, i just dont grow them ::)
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Had a similar thing with strawberries - fantastic flavour in pots or in loam/clay, but put 'em in a sandy soil and they were really not pleasant. (This was all the same variety and, in some cases, the same plants!) Raspberries in the same ground weren't affected, so maybe it depends both on variety and soil type? Are the people with bitter carrots growing on sandy soil, or in very dry conditions?
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Are the people with bitter carrots growing on sandy soil, or in very dry conditions?
Mine are in sandy Fenland soil, which has a fair amount of silt in it. Conditions here are unbelievably dry this year. We've barely had a decent rain shower since April. Whenever I'm hoeing, I keep finding myself thinking that this must be what it's like growing in the Med!
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ahhh sorted, i have waited for them to get a bit bigger and peeled them and they are lovely. The bitterness was definitly in the skins. dohh :D
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good to know. had a few very small baby carrots last week and they were very bitter!
now to look forward to them getting tasty!
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Was just reading a bit of info on the Carrot Museum website, planning how to grow a better crop next year, when I stumbled across this page (http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/cutcarrot.html).
In the footnote at the bottom of the page, it mentions bitter carrots being due to higher levels of antioxidants. So those of us with a bitter crop may also have a healthier crop :)
The article also states that increased antioxidant levels can be induced by causing the plants stress - so I'd guess the reason people are experiencing the bitter taste is probably the weather this year causing the plants to struggle, producing higher antioxidant levels.