Are You Really Able To Grow New Carrots From Just The Tops?

What do blood pressure management, a reduced risk of heart disease, and balanced blood sugar have in common? According to Health.com, these are all possible benefits of eating carrots, so you may want to add them to your diet. If you want to grow your own veggies, it's tempting to follow online hacks that claim it's as easy as using scraps to grow endless amounts of free food. After all, many of us grew up with the phrase "waste not, want not." Unfortunately, not everything online is accurate. 

There is some truth to regrowing garden vegetables from scraps. Lettuce, cabbage, and celery can be rooted in a shallow bowl and replanted in your garden. However, while you will get something edible, they will not replace a full-sized vegetable grown from seed. Growing new plants from scraps is a fun experiment and an excellent way to get a few leaves of lettuce or some seasoning from celery cuttings. But if you follow online advice for regrowing carrots from a cut top, you probably won't get the results you expect.

Can you regrow carrots just from the tops? Well, yes and no. You can regrow part of the carrot by rooting the cut tops in water. As long as part of the root remains, place it in water, and it will quickly grow new thin roots. While this is an exciting concept, the problem with this process is that carrots are taproots — long, fleshy roots that do not regrow after being cut off. 

If you really want to make the most of your veggie scraps and regrow part of your carrot tops, you can plant the rooted portion. While the cutting will not produce a new taproot, you can grow them for greens to eat or to save seeds. The tops of carrots have many culinary uses, often for extra flavor, like fresh herbs. In this TikTok, the content creator implies they are growing these rooted carrots to produce seeds, which can work in the right climate. Since carrots are biennials, they bloom the second year they are in the ground. If you plant your rooted carrots in the fall and leave them over the winter in warmer regions, they will produce new greens in the spring. Those greens will bloom and produce seeds that you can plant for a future crop.