When to sow carrots?
- Botanical name
- Daucus carota
- Family
- Apiaceae
Carrots are sown outdoors from March to July, 0.5 cm deep. They germinate in 20 to 30 days. They are harvested from June to November.
Carrots are biennial plants. The edible parts are the roots, leaves, flowers and seeds.
Carrot needs light, sandy loam. In heavy, compacted or poorly drained soil the root forks and bends. Fresh farmyard manure has the same effect, so it does not go on the bed before sowing.
Sowing is shallow, half a centimetre deep, and always straight into the bed. Carrot is never sown into pots and never transplanted, because a damaged tap root forks. The seed germinates slowly, so the bed looks empty for a long time. It is sown thickly and thinned later to 5 to 8 centimetres.
If the soil dries out, the roots turn tough and bitter. Under straw or cardboard the roots overwinter in the ground.
Carrots through the year
- outdoor sowing
- harvest
In short
Growing conditions
Are carrots toxic to cats and dogs?
No. Carrots are not toxic to cats and dogs.
Companions in the bed
Companion planting is tradition and not an agronomic claim. What is recorded is which pairs sources recommend and which they advise against.
The classic pair against the carrot fly.
The radish comes up fast and marks the row of the slow carrot. It is pulled before the carrot needs the room.
Dill is in the same family as the carrot. A carrot beside dill lags in growth, and the two can cross-pollinate.
- “Widely cited” means the pair is named by three or more independent sources.
- “Cited” means the pair is named by one source or two.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- Just under the skin of the root there are rusty pits and tunnels, with small yellowish larvae in them. The top can turn yellow. An attacked root is no use in store and rots quickly.
- Prevention
- Sow thinly, so that you do not have to thin out, because the smell at thinning is what draws the females in. Sow later and harvest earlier to dodge the first and the second generation. Keep to a rotation, because the fly hatches from the soil.
- What to do
- Cover the whole bed with fine insect mesh from sowing on. Covering the whole bed is more reliable than a vertical barrier along it.
Keep track of your plants with Tendask
Log the task and set a reminder for the next one. Every plant keeps its own history, so there is nothing to guess at.
Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Apiaceae).
Sources about the plant: Clemson Cooperative Extension, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, KGZS Zavod Ljubljana, KGZS Zavod Nova Gorica, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, Semenarna Ljubljana, Smernice za strokovno utemeljeno gnojenje (Mihelič et al., MKGP 2011), Utah State University Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 28 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: EPPO Global Database.