Replanting the carrots I kept in a bucket of sand all winter

14 March 2025 · 3 min read

Carrot is the first biennial I have tried to save, and it has made every annual look easy. A carrot sown in spring makes a root and a tuft of leaves and then stops; it will only flower and set seed in its second summer, after a winter. In a mild climate you leave them in the ground. Here the ground freezes solid for weeks, and the voles find anything left in the bed, so the roots have to be lifted and kept somewhere cold but not frozen until spring.

In the second week of November I dug twelve of the best roots from the row, choosing for the traits I actually want: straight, deep orange, no forking, no green shoulders, and a strong top. I cut the leaves back to about an inch, brushed the soil off without washing them, and packed them upright in a five-gallon bucket of damp sand, not touching, with the shoulders just under the surface. The bucket went into the garage, against the inside wall where my thermometer has read between 36 and 44 °F all winter. I checked it once a month and added a cup of water to the sand in January when it felt dry.

Today I tipped the bucket out. Nine of the twelve are firm, with pale new growth already showing at the crown. Two had gone soft and brown at the tip and the third had a gray mold on the shoulder where it had been touching the side of the bucket. Nine is enough. The advice I have read says a dozen or more plants for good variety in carrots, and nine is a little under, but it is a first attempt and I am not trying to maintain the strain for a century.

They went back into the bed at the far end this afternoon, 18 inches apart, planted so the crown sits just at soil level. Carrot seed heads reach four or five feet and fall over in any wind, so each one gets a stake now rather than later. They will send up stalks in May, flower in June in big flat white umbels that the small wasps and flies adore, and the seed should be ready to cut in late July when the heads turn brown and curl inward.

The one thing I cannot control is wild carrot, which grows along the road a quarter mile away and crosses freely with the garden kind. A quarter mile is probably far enough. If next year’s roots come up white and woody, I will know it was not.