Bed prep for carrots

[Noah Kellerman]

Hi
I’m not sure if this is the right part of the forum for this thread, but here goes: What kind of field prep do you use for carrots? We’ve always used a spading machine on the tractor to till over a foot deep. In the interest of messing up our soil less, and using the animals more, We’d like to do the field prep for root crops with draft power. We can only plow five or six inches deep maximum. We planted parsnips this spring into ground tilled three inches deep, and they did fine (one taproot was about three feet). Carrots are a much bigger part of our annual income, so I’m nervous to do too much experimenting without hearing from others first. Any stories, cautionary tales, triumphs or advice welcome.
Many thanks
-Noah

[Mike Rock]

Noah,
I’ve got a non horse way that worked out well last fall. I had a spot about 20×95 that we could not get to with a plow or horses. I have a Bobcat with a manure grapple. The teeth on the bottom of the grapple are about 6″ apart and about 24″ long. I just stuck those down as far as they would go and rocked the Bobcat a bit, then picked up the big glob of soil and dropped it back down. Went over the whole bed that way, breaking it down 20″ or so. Used the Troy Bilt Horse and planted carrots, radishes, onions for this years sets and peas. Best darned fall carrots I’ve ever seen. Onion sets, radishes, great. Peas got frosted out about a week before they were good. Got a bunch for stir fry though.

At the ‘big end’ of the garden we just had plowed and disked, then made raised beds with the middle breaker plow and raked the tops of the beds. Nice carrots, good weed crop too…the heavy rains prevented us from weeding as well as we should have. Lost almost 5,000 garlic to the flooding.

God bless and good luck.
Mike

This whole site seems to have moved over to facebook, you will get a lot more replies there. I don’t like facebook but that is the way things are going.

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