Growing Huge Carrots and The Importance of Good Soil
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- čas přidán 4. 09. 2024
- I'm harvesting the last of the 2022 vegetables from my forest garden, mainly root crops, which is not ideal in the rain but there are not many dry days forecasted for at least another week. It's incredible how variable the growing results are depending on the quality and the depth of the soil in each bed. It's a good reminder when starting a garden to focus heavily on improving the soil conditions before planting, and to amend the beds during the growing season if possible, and before the next growing season for sure.
My gardens started as dense forest on Canadian Shield bedrock 2 and 3 years ago, so I'm dealing with shallow, sandy soil that's low in nutrients and very acidic. To improve it, I added rotten logs, other forest debris and biochar to slowly compost, add carbon and retain moisture. I then brought in generic, bulk garden soil to increase the depth and add structure. I mixed in copious amounts of homemade compost as well as aged and fresh cattle and sheep manure from farmer friends. I add fish remains, leftovers from all the fish I catch and process throughout the summer fishing season.
To increase the pH level, I mix in wood ash from my indoor and outdoor fires and occasionally add limestone dust or screenings to beds of vegetables that need less acidity.
To increase minerals, I have added carbonatite, a volcanic deposit material that is a mix of essential minerals that will remain in the soil for decades, increasing the health of the plants and the nutrient levels of the vegetables.
On top of this, I regularly add thick layers of mulch, usually wood chips, dried grass and leaves to retain moisture and add carbon and micronutrients back into the soil.
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Not only was that a great harvest, I love how Cali tries to “help” dad with it! She really is the sweetest, greatest companion! Love that dog!!
🥕🍁🦮🥰
She's the Best Companion and family member one could have, Shawn is lucky to have her!
carrot was the theme, huge carrot! Cali?. help?, Dad?, Companion? Love that dog! Just carrots!
Cali might think her big orange throw toy came at one time from the carrot bed! Lol.
Your carrots look really nice! Years ago I had a beautiful carrot patch! Sent my son out, (he was about nine years old at the time, he is now 49) to get me a few carrots to have with our lunch. He was gone for quite a while… I went out to the garden, and there he was. Happily harvesting the entire bed of carrots! Thankfully most of them were good sized! Spent the rest of the afternoon processing carrots!
Aww that's sweet
Late season crops feel like such a treat. And I see carrot tops and thinks about making alot of veggie stock.
"Nose to tail" eating, veggie style - beet and turnip leaves are too often overlooked, but they are good food.
I keep all the tops of the carrots and dry them to use as sort of parsley..fantastic for roasts, broths and garnishment. Beet tops are washed and saved for soups and stews.
One of the most fascinating parts of your journey has been building better soil. I've been so intrigued by your information about the lack of worms in Canada, how poor the soil is, and how sandy. It's been incredible to see how rich it is now. Wow. Those are gorgeous carrots.
My, that’s a lot of carrots. Let’s hope they keep well to feed your family. Take care,be safe. ❤ Dorset, UK
Cali is so sweet as always! I LOVE your dog!
Wow! Those are some huge carrots! Great harvest Shawn!
What a Harvest, this kind of day must really make you feel good after all your hard work.
I noticed how big and healthy your carrots are in an Emily vlog. Great job with the soil, etc.
Carrots, one medium potato and lots of fresh ginger soup, with a dash of Demerara sugar! Blender to thicken. Sticks to your ribs Fall soup! Thank you Shawn!
its good to live of the land
and be self sufficient, and you put a lot of hard work in growing your own crops.
I enjoy watching your videos. stay safe.
I love using carrot greens in soups and salads, and a few chopped in rice, pickles. Yum.
Hi Shawn 🤠 Don't throw all the green carrot tops away, you can make a delicious pesto with them 👍
Or good compost
Great crop Shawn. The books all recommend sand. No?
Yes, pesto. Or soup for the winter!
this has to be the best looking garden ever.. amidst the dense coniferous forest and fall colours
Hello Shawn very good harvest carrot 🥕 they grow very nice , all vegetable growing very nice is lots of sun in your garden so nice see you and your daughter working in a garden all the best guys.
Shawn, next year, you could possibly grow squash on the fence behind you. It would give a nice crop that way, and allow you to rotate your crops that way as well.
Have you considered taking soil from the meadow the stream runs through for your garden? I believe you said it's an old beaver pond. If that's the case, should be a lot of sediment if the pond was there for any length of time and sediments from ponds are incredibly rich to grow plants in. Just a thought I had when you were talking about the soil.
He pumps the creek water up to a storage tank near the garden
お疲れ様です🙋野菜 豊作ですか❓人参は栄養満点 🥕人参はポトフで 食べるのが好きです 😋🍳🍵
I have just finished making my raise bed!! Learning a lot about the soil! I am planting garlic , ginger and turmeric to start off with! Praying that the Lord will bless me with a good crop! Then I will I will continue! Thank you so much Shawn James for teaching! I am a slow learner!
God bless you and your family!🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴🪴
Your careful planning is to be admired.
Carrots are great as there are so many ways to prepare them for meals. That's a good crop that you harvested.
Wonderful harvest. Callie was cute laying in carrot patch with HER carrot waiting for you to toss it. Emily did very well too. Have a good week sir 😊
When I was leading a large community garden we changed from in-ground tags to identify the crop to a scrum map that was on a wall in the main gathering area. The nice thing about the scrum board was that we'd label the name of the crop, when it was (or will be) planted and its expected harvest date. This helps with year to year crop rotation and allowed us a more aggressive schedule for second and third harvests in the same bed during a growing season.
It's wonderful to see you reaping the fruits of your labour, Shawn. A case of good husbandry... Take care of the soil and the soil takes care of you. UK.
Shawn to see you explain what you know
about gardening is amazing but I must tell the truth.
For me to see Cali and her tail wagging like she does
always makes my day!!!
Very nice crop of carrots, it's interesting how the soil quality changes the plants growing, all depends on certain factors. Keep up the good work, stay safe, be careful,take it easy and keep warm and dry.
Shawn, why not use the pitchfork to loosen up the soil and bring the carrots up for easier harvesting?
He maybe concernd that he might damage the carrots, maybe he was removing as many byhand and the rest by pitch fork, there was a pitch fork close by.
He will likely finish up with the pitch fork to loosen up the soil. That's what we would do with potatoes.
I still have my carrots in the ground. What a difference a picture of your garden from last year to today.
Love seeing all the carrots... We had to plant ours 3x this year! I think we were falling into the too dry and not keeping on top of watering! Previous years they popped up so easy.
Shawn congratulations on your harvest, you can see the effort made. I've been following you since you started building the first cabin and it makes me happy to know that all the hard work was worth it. I live in Puerto Rico and here we enjoy a tropical climate that is ideal for planting, every time I see you you motivate me to plant, I am analyzing the possibility of growing honey. Thank you for sharing your processes and I love Cali es Bella. Greetings from the Caribbean.
Bom dia Shawn,um abençoado dia com suas maravilhosas colheitas.parabens👏🙏
What a bountiful harvest!!!
Just amazing watching you harvest these crops. The payoff for all that hard work!
Those are some MASSIVE carrots! Well done. I laughed at Emily pulling one that would be veggies in a dinner for 4!! You guys really will be eating well and knowing how you'll continue improving the soil will mean it will continue to feed you better every year. Awesome.
Amazing!! Harvest time is very rewarding. Now comes the preparation to preserve it. Good luck. God bless.
did you start growing in this bed while you werre still in the old cabin? This video is so visually stunning! the greens,, the autumnal colors! Just gorgeous!
My father used to fill 2.5 gallon pails with sand and put the carrots in it in the cold room he'd hang the buckets so they didn't take up a lot of floor room. They would stay alive most of the winter because the cold room was damp. I'd just go down and pull some for supper. Canned some, but mostly just put them in buckets. Gave use fresh carrots almost all year round.
YES! we maser gardeners from Reno, Nv Xtension office like to call good soil our black gold!!
Love your garden updates beautiful backdrop to your garden, all those yellow and orange tree colors
You put in so much work, im so happy to see the great harvest you got out of it! :)
Callis toy looks like a big carrot😀
That is what I thought it was in a different video. 🥕 I believe Shawn called it Aaron? 😄
Just finished pulling mine up today too. Not quite as big as your carrots. Didn't thin them out enough. Lol. Greetings from Lithuania. 🇱🇹
Awesome harvest of carrots this year Shawn
Nice looking carrots Shawn be great to see the rest of the harvest, we got a lot of great soil for our garden in a camp in Northern BC from up rooted trees .and along bush roads when they dozed the trees over to build roads .it's great soil .
I think that was the happiest I've seen you in your videos so far. :)
Great harvest of carrots . You'll have some good eating over the winter . You're a hard worker , Shawn and I'm happy to see you collect the reward for all your efforts . I always look forward to your videos . Thank you for sharing .
All this time I thought the dog had been running around with an orange toy, but it turns out its a huge carrot....who knew! 🤪😉
Shawn, you could get one of those small size rubbermaid buckets and put big holes in it and take it to the stream for a rinse of you veggies.
Great vegetables and set up on the beds. Way to see what works best.👍❤️
Great crop of carrots, I saw Emily making spiced carrots in a recent video.
They looked really good too. Carrots cooked with orange juice is good also. A little ginger makes it great!
what a good looking harvest. I can smell the carrots clear over here 😄
Você faz jus àquele ditado: *em se plantando, tudo dá*...parabéns pela colheita e pela dedicação, capricho, persistência. Amo o olhar *pidão* da Calli....hehehe
Ahh, the bounty of the land when it is tended with love and knowledge. Hint - the end of a deer antler, with the soft, rounded tip, is the right shape to run through the beds without damaging carrots, beets, onions, etc. And it can make a perfect little trench for sowing seeds too. from Australia.
It's good to see you harvesting before winter sets in, Shawn.
Carrot leaves can also be eaten and made into relishes, dried as a herb, fresh as a salad, pickled etc. Self reliance should also mean using a variety of overlooked food sources
is it tasty though..?
@@originalShea550 yes I have. Have you tried them? Our ancestors grew these plants first for the parts we now throw to garbage or compost. Good food wasted.
Self Reliance also means using what is at hand to add nutrients to the soil.
@@alexkasacous Lol if i had tried them i wouldnt be asking how they tasted.
I like to dehydrate them, then mix them together with other greens I dehydrate, and throw a handful or two into winter stews.
I also like to feed my compost pile with them, or feed the hens with them.
Hi sir，that is so great to see all the veg garden you have plant 🌱
I really loved seeing the beautiful carrots. I used to grow huge gardens back in the day. One year we grew 100 pounds of potatoes in our garden. Lots of carrots too. And beets and onions and Swiss chard. I loved eating all the fresh vegetables and my family my husband and 9 children loved it too. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. Take care and may your family be blessed with safety and health in this rough time of our world. Love you all.
Will you use a hot bed to grow greens in the green house during the winter?
I raised two female doberman doggies and they loved carrots. My oldest girl died in June at the age of 13 1/2. She loved vegetables and we could not go into the garden without her having green pepper and green beans. I was surprised Cali did not get a carrot.
Beautiful harvest. Even more amazing garden buddy 🥰
Thank you , Shawn .
🐺
Nice Harvest Shawn
Congratulations on the harvest and enjoy
Great job Shawn!
I think I thought of 3 different ways to make different garden boxes on 4 posts higher up off of the ground to stay standing up while doing all the gardening work. Each way all has either 4 pieces of frame wood to make the rectangle frame or they have 8 pieces of like 2 x 4s or something. 4 going around the top of the posts and 4 somewhere maybe 2 to 2 1/2, or so feet down making another rectangle frame and then I think some kind of Gridded Wire could be stapled onto that rectangle frame or nailed with those U shaped nails and after that grid wire is up You could either try to spread some kind of cement all on it to make a solid box on the wood post legs or maybe some kind of fiberglass resin coating all over the grid wire may work. Then just drill holes in the bottom of it and pour a layer of rocks, sand, topsoil and the organic layer on top and then you can plant in those too. Those are 2 ways. The 3rd way is to try to find some business that makes custom plastic molds and you could have them make a garden box out of plastic that could be fastened to the wood frame on the posts. I have no idea how plastic molds are made though. Anyways, then when it comes time to harvest maybe you could just use a smaller pitch fork with a much shorter handle and a digging trowel. All you got to do is shovel all the ingredients into the boxes.
You might be able to make a box that's all wood but that's more work and wood materials to have to get and the other ways would cut down on the wood material needed. I think the wood would have to be coated in something that would last a very long time. I don't know. The dirt would be in it and I don't know if that would deteriorate the wood and water on the wood all the time. Beats me it could be fine to make a burnt wood one. Or you could weld an Aluminum box and secure it to some posts. Maybe even using Tarp material inside of a wooden garden box on posts would protect the wood from the soil and be a cheap solution to be able to build alot of them. Still good for growing crops while it's flooding.
My dog Lucy loves carrots and would have quickly eaten every carrot you pulled.
Just a thought for longer and broader carrots, a broad rake used in the bed prior to planting coated pelleted seeds aerates the soil so they can grow deeper. Nice job on the yield!!
Interesting, I never considered growing huge carrots because my target was small carrots that I can put maybe 15 whole into one pint jar as gifts.
Very nice carrot harvest 🥕🥕🥕🥕👍🏻✌🏻🦮
Harvest them with a straight pitch fork, it is easier and better for the carrots and the growing bed. Before the snow take over, create a silo, for the duration of the winter and safe from wild life, deers love them also.
Those Carrots look great. I live Carrots and ear one every single day.
Great crop of carrots Shawn.
I had a smaller haul of carrots compared to you. I used all my carrot tops to make pesto. It is very good.
A pretty darn nice crop of carrots if you ask me. 😊
Ah, the smell of fresh food.... 🥰
We used to rake away the top deciduous leaves on the forest floor and dig up what we called leaf Mold. It was amazing fertilizer, but only for small beds or the bottom of plant pots as it’s not a deep layer and is labor intensive.
So interested to see how you’ll prep the garden for the incoming snow season. As an Australian, I’ve got no clue! :)
The leaves behind you are so pretty
Are you planning on rotating plots each year? There’s an old rhyme which goes - Beans, Greens, Fruits, Roots - so the carrot plots should have beans or peas next. I think it help with soil nutrition
Wow! That a lot of carrots to deal with! I used to leave plenty of root crops in the ground for winter use. Once ready for harvest at the end of the season, I covered them with layers of maple leaves. about 6" then sprinkle the layer with bone meal, blood meal and garden lime, add another layer of leaves and bone meal, blood meal, lime until each bed was deeply mounded up to 2' high. In the dead of winter you just move the decomposing leaf mass aside and harvest carrots or root crops as needed, putting the leaf mass back. By spring all the maple leaves had been pulled down into the soil by the worms with only a slight crust left in the spring. In a couple years of doing that to all beds ( crops in ground or not ), you could just reach into the best soil that grew huge crops. With all your maple trees around you, you have a wealth of potential great garden soil. That compost made even the worst soil a great producer....
Awesome harvest .
You do great
NICE HARVEST!!! Do take care. Fl., U.S.A.
The orange colour of carrots is made by Dutch farmers in Honour of the Dutch Royal Famu=ily, The house of Orange. The first carrots where white.
Emily has you beat with her carrots size and quality.
Wonder if Cali would fetch a carrot flung by the greens?
I’d love to see some okra stalks in your bed next season. Okra is delicious pan fried cut into wagon wheels. Pickled okra is great as well. Okra loves a nitrogen rich soil. My raised bed has chicken manure compost. It’s the best fertilizer.
hinges and hooks. If you take one side of your raised beds, and hinge it so one side folds down, then put 2 hooks on each end to lock it closed, when it comes time to harvest the underground veggies, you can just tip the side down to loosen the soil and make it easier to get them out. Bend the hooks to 90 degrees so you don't have to screw them into the ends of the boards.
Have you done this?
Very interesting. Looking good so far. Keep up the great work.🤓👍🤓👍.
I find it’s always easier to harvest carrots with a pitch/potato fork. Harvested some last Friday, carrots were quite hairy. Large, good form. Bolero strain.
Shawn , you produced a beautiful an bountiful garden.
Nice rain in those carrots. Beautiful harvest and the tops are good for compost.
love carrots and love cali she is a beautiful dog
BEAUTIFUL SEASON...autum is my favorit season ever....i just saw EMILY`S chanel...ouaaaa the forest see from the drone is offff breath kut....CANADA is SWIZERLAND by XXXL as a deir of my just constated on the place.
BRAVO JAMES all the recolt mirrow your desirve after a hard epuizant work....i pray for you never ever think again that all what you donne is lost energi,time and waisted efort.
Cali says... look dad! I've got my own carrot! It just happens to be my toy! 😂😊
Wow, lots of carrots!
Celery leaves are good, as are other leaves except rhubarb
Beautiful garden harvest. Would be interesting to see the harvest recipes . Stay safe. Hugs to Cali.
Thanks for the update and information Shawn!
Bugs Bunny would be in paradise on your land Shawn James,lol!
That’s a whole lot of carrots, l sure hope that they keep well through the winter Shawn. That’s truly a blessing! 😎😎😎✅✅✅🤩🤩🤩💯💯💯🙌🙌🙌
Hope your ready looks like Upper Michigan got a foot of snow
Nice harvest.
SHAWN & OUR CALI !!! This is what I used to find up North in Wisconsin for carrots !!! Now here in Illinois It is smaller in width and length !!! Have been thinking of long beds for just the carrots !!! Tried the Larger pots !!!