I made a post documenting Carrots for cookingwith an update for this year.
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Now is the time to send in any seeds you would like to contribute. You can ask for a label by using this link. 2026 Seed Contributions Thank you!
This was a horrible year for carrot root fly 
but thankfully I’ve certainly identified resistance, even if it was less than 10% of my grow out of gts mix. Easily two thirds rotted in the ground by midsummer, and most of the survivors had extensive damage. homemade mix had maybe one variety with any sort of resistance, but they’re my favorite of that mix anyway. Planted in infertile alkaline clay soil.
I’m not asking for suggestions to remedy, just sharing my “progress”. I planted perennial onions in their place, and have the good dozen or so in peatmoss in the fridge.
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Hopefully next year will be better.
Hello All,
We planted GTS carrot mix for the first time this spring – it did not sprout and grow too terribly well. However, we have some plants that will be part of our 2026 seed saving. Here in Albuquerque, we can plant in the spring or the fall for harvest in late summer or up until January or… we can leave them and they will overwinter in the ground and flower the following year. This summer we collected our first ever carrots seeds from plants grown last year that included the Experimental Farm Network purple carrot breeding mix, Red Nantes, and New Kuroda all planted in 2024 – we’re sending in seed contributions to GTS soon.
We are not selecting individual roots for anything yet, but the population has to be able to sprout without histrionics or any pre-treatment. Since we’re at a busy school garden we can manage to hand water well for about a week or so, and then they’re on their own to sprout and survive with our regular 2-3x week minimal irrigation. We weed the bed before planting and then they’re mulched lightly, and have to deal with whatever weeds come up until we can spot weed a little if we’re lucky. (We grow all our plants at very close spacing, and the carrots crammed into a bed seem to fight the weeds rather well, even our bindweed). I’m also not a fan of thinning, so they don’t get that – they end up just growing outward from each other just fine. Then they have to survive summer temps hovering around both sides of 100F and winter in the ground down to 12F.
A side note: Some of the flowering seed carrots happened to be in the same beds we planted zucchinis in this summer – I do think the carrot flowers help attract all kinds of predator-type pollinators. I’m cautiously optimistic because we had less squash bug pressure in that bed this year. So this fall we purposely planted our saved seeds as well as more New Kuroda and Red Nantes in next summer’s squash beds – we’ll harvest some of it and leave a good portion of all of those to flower along with the GTS plants for 2026 seeds.
I’m sorry, I don’t have pictures of any of the seed plants from this summer.
GTS bed planted spring 2025 for seed in 2026. To the left and in next picture are the EFN seeds planted on the same day in spring 2025
EFN purple – planted spring 2025 for seed in 2026
Fall planted saved carrot seed intermixed with winter lentils and arugula.
Here is a picture of a sampling from a U-pick one of our classes led for our school community.
Thanks, Everyone, for working on this – it’s awesome to share, and I’m excited about the prospect of having carrots that I don’t need to worry and fuss over.
Heidi
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I made a new thread about Resistance against carrot fly and am curious if any og you have input on that topic.
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