The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Carrot harvest failure

carrot close up

This post is to remind us to harvest carrots a little earlier next year.

Turns out there was some sort of grub that got into a few, and then spread when we had them stored in the refrigerator root cellar.

A half hour of scrubbing and cleaning was needed to weed out the yuck.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Turns out the area where i planted potatoes had wire worms, a small orange segmented worm that bores into root crops, potatoes and carrots especially. This ruined pretty much the whole harvest, though i was able to cut around the holes and use those potatoes first, there was still major crop loss. Dont know if that is what got your carrots, but it is quite disappointing. I hope you can salvage some, even for goat feed. And if anyone has a method for removing wire worms, please speak up. That whole 1200 sq ft. Space is now out of rotation for any root crops, and thats problematic.
Comment by Deb Tue Jan 12 16:43:20 2016

Deb's comment intrigued me, I'd never heard of wire worms, but I found this really great PDF about them. It even has suggestions for non-chemical management! file:///C:/Users/d0442ft/Downloads/FINAL%20wireworm%20pnw607.pdf I couldn't find anything anywhere about their home range, so unless you've seen them and know it's wireworms, that's a largely academic pdf.

Comment by Emily Wed Jan 13 10:30:44 2016

Hi All,

I am wondering what is missing in the soil or bug population that makes the produce have this problem?

Julius Henzel [bread from stones] suggests that granite dust is a pretty good soil fixer. I have also had good luck with fresh sea water, seaweed, and sea shells.

A detailed soil test might also give some clues [Logan Agridyne III or similar].

John

Comment by John Thu Jan 14 02:31:32 2016
That's super sad to see! Had something similar with our harvest a few years back. Takes forever to work through them all :-( Thought we were through the worst of it but we were hit with what we thought was the same thing this last year, but turns out it's something called violet root rot (this is the best info I could find on it here)? Pro tip for anyone else out there: keep an eye out for it. It might not have eaten through our carrots but it's just as bad. Planning on planting in looser, drier soil this time around and hoping for a better outcome. Fingers crossed!
Comment by Kate Tue Apr 12 00:19:28 2016





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