The Simple Carrot Growing Hack You Need To Ensure A Healthy Harvest

Delicious in soups, salads, stews, sautéed, roasted, and even juiced, carrots are an all-time favorite in the garden. However, if you've ever tried to grow them yourself, you may have realized they're a bit finicky and sometimes hit or miss. Luckily, TikTok user @theyoungnonno has shared a genius carrot-growing hack that makes germination a breeze and leads to abundant, delicious carrots. The trick is to use burlap to cover freshly sown carrot seeds and water them through the burlap. 

This hack works so well because it traps moisture beneath the burlap cloth, allowing the soil to stay consistently wet and preventing it from drying out. Carrots need plenty of water during the germination phase for a successful harvest, and often, this is only easy to achieve if you have drip irrigation on timers. Even so, the soil can quickly dry out, leaving you with poor germination rates. 

This hack can work whether growing carrots in containers or growing them in a garden bed. Additionally, carrots are not fast-growing vegetables in the garden; they can take 70 to 120 days to mature, so after you sprout your seedlings, they will require ongoing TLC and dedication to get a healthy harvest.

In the video, @theyoungnonno first makes ridges in the soil for the carrot seeds, ensuring even spacing. To do this, you'll need some sort of tool or apparatus (your hands work great, too) to create shallow ridges in the soil. Make sure they are even and not too deep, as carrots do not like to be sown too deep. After planting the seeds, cover them with a little bit of soil and grab your burlap. Cover your raised bed or container with the burlap and find a way to keep it taut so that it is not touching the soil. Water the seeds well, but be sure to water the bed or container after securing the burlap too. This creates a greenhouse effect, where the moisture is trapped underneath the burlap, ensuring the soil never dries out completely. However, while humidity is not let out, light can still enter through the porous burlap cloth.

When growing carrots, if the soil dries out at any point during seed germination, it can affect the shape of the carrot and even prevent the seeds from germinating. After the seeds sprout and the seedlings are 1-2 inches tall, he recommends removing the burlap. 

You can get burlap at your local garden center for an economical price. It's definitely worth the investment if you're trying to get a good-sized reaping of carrots. Gardeners can easily get discouraged by a low germination rate and poor carrot harvest. However, the answer is simple: use burlap to ensure the soil never dries out and stays consistently moist.