A garden expert has shared her method that she says will enable you to grow carrots that last all year.

Jess Gough, known online as ‘Happy Smallholding’, is a Somerset-based gardener who shares her life on her smallholding and everything it has to offer on her TikTok account. She also gives advice and hosts courses on how to grow your own food.

In a recent video, Jess explained that she manages to grow a year’s supply of carrots in her garden which will last her until next spring.

“This is how I grow carrots in just three simple steps,” she said at the start of the video, explaining that there are two different types of carrots.

“Early carrots are sown early in the season, in early spring. And they take about two months to mature. So they’re ready earlier in the season.

Main crop varieties are sown later in the spring and all through the summer, and these take about three months to mature, so they’re ready slightly later in the season.

“If you want to have carrots all year around, you can grow your carrots successionally. So sow carrots every couple of weeks, and you’ll have carrots pretty much all year round.”

Step 1: Sowing

The first thing you should do is prepare where you want to grow your carrots before it’s time to sow them.

“Make a drill about a centimetre deep and then water the drill. And watering the drill first just prevents your seeds from slipping all over the place when you come to water them in,” Jess explained. “Sow your seeds quite thickly along the drill. I find that carrots can be fickle to germinate, so I sow a couple of seeds per centimetre.

She continued: “Cover the drill over and then give it another water. Keep your carrot seeds well watered until they germinate, particularly on dry, warm days and the combination of warmth and the moisture will trigger your carrots to germinate.

Step 2: Thinning

“To ensure your carrots reach a decent size you need to thin them out, otherwise they’ll compete with each other and they’ll stay quite small,” Jess told her viewers.

“Once your plants have a set of true leaves, it’s time to thin them out,” she said. “I just pull out my seedlings, making sure that I’m left with one carrot every three centimeters for early varieties because they’re smaller, and one carrot every five centimeters for main crop varieties because they get bigger.”

You don’t have to thin your carrots. However, not thinning them will mean your carrots don’t reach their maximum size, and it could cause crops to wrap around each other.

Step 3: Harvesting

“Step three, the most exciting part, is harvesting,” Jess said. “Early carrots are ready about two months after sowing, and main crop carrots are ready about three months after sowing.”

To do this, Jess said she just pulls up the carrots as and when she needs them.

“I even leave my main crop varieties of carrots in the ground over the winter,” she said. “Just make sure you choose a nice hardy variety, and as long as you’re not in a super cold part of the world, you can leave your carrots in the ground over the winter and they’ll be just fine.”

As carrots tend to get carrot fly, Jess recommends planting chives along with your carrots, as the smell of the chives will hide the smell of the carrots, protecting them from carrot fly.