Square Foot Gardening Seed Mat
These carrots were harvested today. 7.7 lbs of great tasting Envy carrots were harvested in my raised bed at the Tipp City Community Garden. I used the Square Foot Gardening Seed Mat to grow these. The mats are only 12” x 12” and can be used in any raised beds or garden space- especially if you want to space your plants using the Square Foot Garden Method.
The seed mat works great for carrots since the seeds are so small, hard to plant and hard to space. The seed mat spaces the seed for you. I had no issues with weeds in-between the carrots and never thinned them (if I had, I could have gotten larger carrots, but am happy to harvest a mix of different sizes). They have been in the ground for approximately 90 days with no maintenance other than fertilizing twice with Root Crops Alive and some water duty. I harvest 79 carrots that were at least 4” long. Those weighed in for a total of 7.7 pounds! The largest carrot was at least 12” long. Most if not all were straight and they had no insect damage on them whatsoever (benefit of choosing your own soil in a raised garden bed). You may remember an earlier blog post where I had Black Swallow Tail caterpillars on the leaves. As you can see, and I did leave them alone, there was no damage or marked reduction in yield.