| 
| 
_ say respecting field-carrots. 
CARROT. 
not less than two feet deep; but any soil which 
is friable, pulverulent, free from recent manure, 
comparatively free from vegetable excretion, and 
sufficiently deep, will suit. The finest sandy 
loam, though it were a yard deep and in the 
finest tilth, if it be charged with the excretions 
of many previous garden crops, and in conse- 
quence overrun with the eggs of minute insects, 
may not be able to bring a single carrot crop to 
perfection ; and a deep adhesive loam, so stiff 
and clayey as to be utterly unpromising, if it be 
recently recovered from a long period of grass, 
and rendered properly porous by the intermixture 
of arenaceous or other loosening matter, may 
bring all the plants of a crop to a healthy and 
even gigantic maturity. The great preventives 
of success to carrot culture in gardens are recent 
manure and a profusion of the eggs of insects ; 
and the former of these is to be averted either 
by relying wholly on the manure of some previ- 
| ous year, or by using only the most finely divided 
old simple manure in a state of intimate inter- 
mixture with the soil; and the latter, in the case 
of ground which has been long under garden 
crops, is to be averted by such a special manner 
of trenching as to bury nine or ten inches of sur- 
face-stratum of the soil at least two feet deep, to 
cover it over’ with a thin coat of some caustic 
matter which will prevent the worms of its in- 
sect’s eggs from ascending out of it, and to consti- 
tute all the new surface and central strata of 
| matter as nearly as possible resembling virgin 
soil. Fresh manure in carrot-ground causes the 
plants to fork; and even well-rotted dunghill 
‘manure, when added year by year to any spot of 
| ground, speedily renders it so replete with minute 
worms as to be ruinous to carrots. Whatever 
garden soil has become foul with the eggs of in- 
sects is certain, if sown with carrots, to surrender 
the young, soft, succulent, saccharine roots of the 
crop as the choicest of all food to its insect mul- 
titudes. To trench such soil in the ordinary 
manner is not to place its insects’ eggs beyond 
the vivifying influence of air and heat, but merely 
to disperse them through the uplifted subsoil ; 
and hence ‘the necessity of carefully burying it 
all at the bottom of a deep trenching, of treading 
it down into its bed, and of sealing it over with 
such a mixture of quicklime and sand as will lie 
like a sheet of mortar between it and the new 
soil. 
The selection of seed for the garden sowing of 
carrots, the mode of preparing it for sowing, and 
some points of culture and harvesting will be 
fully indicated in what we have afterwards to 
The garden ground 
for carrots may either be disposed in drills a foot 
asunder for drill-sowing, or in beds not more 
| than four feet wide for broadcast-sowing. Inthe 
latter case, it ought, before sowing, to be laid 
perfectly smooth, and, before raking, to be gently 
trodden. The seed, if good, should be sown thin; 
and the young plants, when they attain a due 
height, should be thinned out to distances of 
from three to eight inches, according to the sea- 
son of the crop, and the intention of drawing 
them for use when small, when middle-sized, or 
not till full-grown. The different kinds of car- 
rot, early and late, horn and long, may be sown 
in such succession as to afford small and middle- 
sized roots for use in March, April, May, June, 
and July, large roots in August and September, 
and full-grown roots of the greatest size in Octo- 
ber, and thence, if they be properly stored in 
sand, throughout the winter. Small crops for 
young roots in late spring and early summer, are 
sown in January and February; main crops in 
March and April; successional crops of young 
roots, in May, June, and July; and crops for the 
earliest young roots of spring, in the beginning of 
August. The January sowing should be made 
on a moderate hotbed, and the February sowing 
on a warm border ; the chief main crop may be 
most advantageously sown from the first till the 
tenth of April; and the crop which is sown in 
the beginning of August and stands over the 
winter must, in all frosty weather, be sheltered 
with a covering of litter. 
The best soil for the field growth of carrots is 
a loose, sandy, friable loam, of at least eighteen 
inches in depth; and hence the light and fertile 
sands of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Surrey have been 
longer and more extensively used as field-carrot 
ground than any other equal extent of land in 
Britain. But poor soft sand, which is scarcely 
able to produce any other crop, provided it be 
deep enough, may be quite suitable for carrots ; 
and, in some instances, land of this ight, worth- 
less, barren sort, has made a most magnificent re- 
turn of carrots, when all the best loams of all the 
gardens of the surrounding district have brought 
scarcely one root to maturity. Soils of almost 
any kind are suitable which possess the requisites 
of depth, openness, and perfect freedom from 
stones. Even drained peat soil of proper depth 
is well fitted to produce sure and excellent crops. 
Carrots require rather mechanical than chemical 
fitness in soils ; and if permitted to shoot down 
their roots unobstructedly and freely to the ut- 
most depth which they have organic power to 
attain, and to spread freely and far around the 
slender hairy, filiform radicles which contain the 
minute spongioles for the absorption of their 
food, they can readily afford to want a very large 
proportion of the elements of nutrition which are 
essential to most other crops; and even when 
these elements are present in the soil,—such as 
those which form the nitrogenous seeds of the 
cereal grasses, and the vitreously saline coating 
of their culms,—the carrots leave them where 
they find them, almost totally unabsorbed. A 
crop of barley after carrots, provided no impover- 
ishment be permitted by weeds, will be quite as 
good, or within a mere trifle of being quite as 
good, as if taken instead of the carrots, and with- 
out their intervention. Carrots, more than most 
ra a nerenreres A 
