Big fat round coloured carrots?

[templeton]

I have real trouble growing long root vegetables - I don't have the soil, and I don't hold my tongue right, I reckon.
So, I've thought of breeding up some short fat round carrots with a few different colours in them.
I'm waiting on seed of a round baby carrot - 'Thumbellina', which I intend to cross up with some purples, oranges, yellows and whites - I'm going to cheat here, by buying in some mature coloured carrots from the local farmer's market next week, and plant them out so they flower next spring.

Since I won't have two year old Thumbellinas to cross them with, does anyone have any hints on how I might induce these carrots to flower at the same time so i can get them to cross?

And is there a big round carrot out there? Is there a physiological reason why big carrots have to be long? Why isn't there a big round carrot like there are big round beetroot?
Does this sound like a breeding pipe dream? (I understand that carrots have serious issues with inbreeding depression, but I'll cross that hurdle when i come to it)
T

[castanea]

We have a semi-related thread on a closely related issue - stock carrots or field carrots.

See the Mastodon carrots thread:

alanbishop.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=brassica&thread=5747&page=1

In the past there have been big round carrots largely used as animal feed just as mangels are used for animal feed. To some extent the rise in popularity of corn led to the disuse of stock carrots in North America. You will still find some of them in Europe.

Wikipedia says: "Field Carrot varieties bred and introduced to UK agriculture include Scarlet Intermediate in 1900, Mid Season Scarlet (1911), Mammoth White (1924), Intermediate Stump Rooted (1935), Red Cored Early Market (1935), Short Stump Rooted (1938), Giant White (1939)."

[12540dumont]

Hi Templeton, In my climate, if I don't harvest the Paris Market (round carrots) promptly, they get huge. I'm doing a carrot trial which I haven't posted yet, as it's not planted. It would be great if you would consider doing the carrot trial as well, when I finish up with my year.

Castanea and I are both interested in fatter carrots. IMHO, everything is getting smaller, melons and squashes and now carrots. Okay fine with the melon and squash, but why should carrots be so small?

One year, I grew these horse carrots (this what Leo calls a giant carrot). I had lost them under some weeds. They were fabulous. Sweetest carrot I have ever grown. So, I'm looking for bigger carrots. Carrots I can dry, juice, freeze, etc. I have a huge pile of carrot seed.
As soon as I plant the trial, I'll let you know what's left over and send them your way, if you are interested.

I always grow Paris Market carrots. Those are my everyday carrot here. They are about an inch round, unless I forget to pick them, and then then get to be 2 inches. This is my go to carrot. I buy new seeds each year.

So this will be my first serious year with carrots. I have to make sure to eliminate CMS and anything I don't love the taste of. Then, I'm going to let them cross and intercross till I have my own great carrot (ala Joseph).

[templeton]

I did see the Mastadon thread, and read it a while ago, but I didn't know they were big fat round ones
Will check it out.
Holly,
I've just trawled through the Aust Quarantine Inspection Service ICON database, and it looks like carrot seed is an allowed import, subject to the usual genus+species labellling.

I did go a bit overboard yesterday and purchased some nantes type seed, and a multicolour mix that I was going to add to my Three Colours Purple, Baby, and Dragon seed that I've already got, so I'm not sure how much more I need - unless you want a cross-hemisphere comparison, which I might find room for. One of my problems is year to year I'm always a bit unsure of how much water i will have - I can put drippers on individual plant like tomatoes and peppers, but supplying water through a really dry summer to continuous row crops is problematic. That's why I'm trying an autumn crop.
T

[raymondo]

Holly, I often have carrots that are 'oversized' by supermarket standards and they are almost always deliciously sweet. Mind you, I grow mine over the coldest part of the year which I think helps them develop their sugars.

T, if you sow your round carrots now, they'll go to flower in spring. Biennial, for carrots at least, just means they need to go through a winter. So getting it to flower won't be a problem. The problem will be getting them to all flower at the same time!

[templeton]

Thanks Ray. I thought that might happen.
Maybe I could fridge them all for a while, and pull them out together to plant. If I remember
T

[Joseph Lofthouse]

My soil has a lot of clay, so I am not able to dig any root crop that goes deeper than 6". Around here, grocery store carrots tend to be imperator types (long and skinny) so they are not suitable for growing in my soil since they break off and leave part of the root behind.

The good news is that carrots are very susceptible to selection for root shape. After a couple generations in my garden I ended up with roots that look like: Danver's, and half-nantes, and chantenay types. How fat they get is highly influenced by how long you leave them in the ground, but the chantenay get the fattest in my garden.

For a photo of a 2 pound Chantenay carrot see: Fat Carrot

The bad news is that just about all of the carrots you get at the grocery store and any hybrid seeds that you obtain, are male sterile. So i'd recommend starting with open pollinated seeds and forget the grocery store.

As far as timing goes... I'd grow out the seed crop, and then plant the thumbelina seeds this fall (mid-summer as soon as the seeds are harvested) along with the harvested seed. In many climates the roots will get big enough before winter to select for fatness.

[canadamike]

I am not sure that carrots are true biennials, the original ancient ones, I have many of them from Grin, are mostly biennial. I see it like being a bit like winter wheat...

There is not much difference between annual and biennial, it is only a matter of a few months of growing, and the growth is interrupted by winter in most cases...it could be heat in Africa I guess...

Just a hunch here, from past experience with other stuff, I would start my carrots indoors NOW and overcrowd them a bit so they fight for survival, then transplant them, another shock...since the job of any plant is to survive, those 2 ''stresses'' could help the plant go to seed. I would plant late the other one...if you cut flowers anyway, carrots will keep on producing some, the limiting factor being enough time to bring them to ripeness, it is a matter of climate and frost....

[canadamike]

Oh! And I agreee with Dumont that Paris market or other rounds can become huge. I also agree that huge carrots are very sweet.

They say the Oxheart likes humusy soil, I grew it in clayish soil with great success, they simply pull out of the ground..

The arabs have a neat trick to transforn any oversized carrot into lots of incredibly sweet baby ones: they split them in two then, Ising a very fine knife, split the core from the outer ''whatever it is in english '' I do not know how to say this...

The end result is out of this world, way way better than the whole carrot, and I nibble on the juicy core, it is a perfectly refreshing raw vegetable, flavorful and all if less sweet than the other part...