Selection of carrots for seed?

[StripedCorn]

My best carrots for this year. I was Wondering if anybody knows how size impacts taste and quality? Also if white carrots taste differently, i was eating the smaller white ones and noticed an undesirable taste that i can't really describe.
How do people with hard winters store carrots? In ground or Tucked away in storage?

[reed]

I think here they do or would do better in the ground. I say would cause when I replanted mine as soon as they started growing the chipmunks pulled them up and ate em. So if you try in the ground and have chipmunks cover them over with some hardware screen or something. I think they would be ok once they rooted back down good. I just started trying to get seed a couple years ago and thought I had it licked till the critters attacked.

It's personal taste but I like orange carrots, white are kinda nasty I think and purple are real nasty. I love the look of those short blocky ones on the right, are they an Ox Heart type?

[steev]

I also prefer orange, though purple are OK; white seems a bit meh; blocky ones are all that really works in my mineralized soil, so far; I love Ox Heart, so thick while still good; I think fat rounds look good in a stew or soup.

[richardw]

I'm the same too in that i much prefer the orange carrots, they are the only colour i deal with nowadays with my crossing.
I wonder how cold they can handle if left in the ground? well..its something i dont have to worry about at least.

[philagardener]

I like Ox Heart too - it has been the best carrot I have found for my clay soil. I had success lifting and storing a crop in my refrigerator crisper drawer in a plastic bag for planting out the following Spring for a big seed crop. I also routinely have a root or two in my garden that overwinters without problem here in PA.

Biggest issue is crossing to Queen Anne's Lace. White roots taste soapy to me, and I haven't found a red/purple I like either. I had a few yellow rooted carrots a couple of years ago were quite good. But I still haven't found an orange carrot that reminds me of how great they tasted pulled straight from my grandfather's garden and washed at the spigot.

[StripedCorn]

The short blocky carrots came from unlabeled seed given to me by a neighbor. All the white ones have been fed to the other neighbors dog. Im going to try overwintering them in the ground since i don't have much pest pressure.  Next year Im going to try to grow out some more purple varieties to see if any of them are decent.

[12540dumont]

I've tried 6 purples....yuck..taste like diesel. Juane de Doubs (a yellow) was "okay", but nowhere near as good as St. Valery, Ox Heart, Chantenay, Berlicum, or Nantes di Chioggia. I even like the Paris Market for extra early carrots. I stick mine in the fridge for a week or two and then stuff them back in the ground. The slight chilling mixed with the September and October heat often gives me seed the same year.

Good luck, there's a lot of great oranges out there Kuroda and Royal Chantenay from Eden Seeds were great. I'd really like to mix these two with St. Valery and Ox Heart...

[StripedCorn]

Thank you, 12540dumont. Im going to include a few of those next year. Ive already ordered some purple so I might as well try em. Luckily my sense of taste is barely passable so I might not be able to taste those as much. Although the white ones tasted chemical to me so I can taste something.

[richardw]

Ive added St Valery to my Benhorn line, it grew to be an amazingly tall thin carrot.

[StripedCorn]

richardw, I like your shovel handle.

[richardw]

Thanks mate, i make all my own handles as i dont like the hickory handles that come with all shop bought tools, they are so inferior to some of the New Zealand native hardwoods for durability, the best one i use a lot of is Manuka Leptospermum scoparium , the key to finding the best handle is to look for a dead standing tree, cut a living tree and when it starts to dry it splits badly, dry standing it doesn't but you still linseed oil them. The best part about using Manuka is when the handle is getting near the end of its life and you hear that first sound of it breaking you know you've got about 18 months to find another handle before it lets go and breaks. Hickory can instantly snap. Hey??, maybe there's an export market in the US for Manuka tool handles?? they are not a protected tree because they are considered a weed by grassland farmers, its a colonising species that reclaims grasslands (fucking three cheers), oh by the way, its easy to find stems that come a lot straighter than mine if ya hunt around, do some bush bashing as they say. An even better wood is lancewood Pseudopanax crassifolius , ive got one wide mouth shovel with this wood but its still early days yet to know how it will do, but ive heard that if ya oil them well you can get a lifetime use from it. 

[imgrimmer]

traditionally carrots were stored in sandboxes dug deep into the ground to protect them from frost.
something like this:


I wonder if they can be selected for hardiness. Last winter there was one survivour in my garden. But it was not too cold last year.

[steev]

There ya go, richardw; make do with what is at hand; isn't that what Homo saps have always done? We might survive a while yet, if we get off this "buy what is commercially available" bullshit.

imgrimmer: so many really useful old practices have been forgotten, thanks to more energy-intensive modern practices, like "climate-controlled" refrigeration, not the least of which being global produce shipping. As petroleum-fueled industry dies, we will re-discover the sustainable techniques of the past, or perish.

Personally, I think I'm banking on canning and fermenting.

[richardw]

Talking of old practices. i remember potatoes been stored in mounds covered with a hay/straw thatch to shed the water and keep the frost out

[reed]

Funny, I spent an hour or so yesterday researching how to make those, thanks to steev I knew what to search for. It was called a clamp. My Grand dad used them, a looong time ago. 

My design for a test I think is gonna be an old cooler, partially buried in the ground. Around the walls of the above ground part will be tubes made of sections of that perforated flexible drainage pipe filled with empty pop bottles and foam egg cartons with a layer of leaves and dirt. On top a blanket of similar composition with old indoor outdoor carpet as the casing. Then I can just lift the blanket, take out what we need and put the blanket back on.

If it works I'll make a larger more permanent one. Only thing I'm stuck on is the old diagrams of clamps show a tuft of straw sticking out the top for ventilation, not sure how to work that in yet. Also figure there needs to be something inside to fill air spaces, probably use a mix of shredded egg cartons and sand for that.