Soda Bottle Carrots: a Very Small Kitchen Garden
Posted by admin | Under home kitchen garden, plant vegetables, small kitchen garden Tuesday Jul 28, 2009
Seventeen days after I planted carrots in a sawed-off soda bottle, young carrot tops had sprouted on the windowsill in my basement.
I encourage people who have little space that they can still grow small kitchen gardens. To that end, on May 1st I cut the top off of a two-liter soda bottle, filled the bottle with soil, and planted carrots in it. I described this project in a post titled Small Kitchen Garden Carrots in Containers. I mentioned my container carrots again on May 18, and again on June 17. It has been an interesting project, and I encourage you to try it. I want to relate what to expect.
Mature Container Carrots
After three months of growing, a carrot of nearly any variety should be mature. By “mature” I mean the carrot plant has sent up a flower stalk and is making seeds. I would rather eat an immature carrot than I would one that has flowers. In fact, I’ve only let my carrots flower once, and I vowed that season never again to do so.
After three months of growth, my container carrots have pathetic tops. These are no better than a third the height of my in-ground carrots. I planted the in-ground carrots fully a month after the soda bottle carrots; and woodchucks have dined twice on the in-ground carrot tops.
So, my container carrots—a variety that matures in 65 days—ought to be dropping seeds all over my deck. That’s hardly the case. Rather, the carrot tops started to look stressed some time in June, and now they look very stressed. These stressed plants have very short tops compared to free-range carrot plants. Those tops have fewer fronds than my in-ground carrots do, and many of the carrot fronds are turning yellow or purple or some other color that isn’t green.
The good news is that those sickly-looking carrot tops protrude from very pronounced orange carrot shoulders. It should follow that there are whole carrots in the soil beneath those shoulders, albeit rather small carrots.
Pushing Plants
When my container carrots started to look bad, I took some steps to pep them up: I pulled a carrot to provide a bit more space in the soil (I’d planted 11 seeds). I also made a mixture of compost and water and poured it into the carrot container to provide an infusion of nutrients. The carrot plants weren’t impressed.
So, I decided that the container carrots are done: there are too many carrots growing in too small a space. I harvested them to put the poor things out of their misery. My suspicions about crowding were oh so right: I shook the soil out of the planter, and it came out in a cylindrical brick. You could use several hundred of these carrot planter bricks to build a small sod house.
The good news: my soda bottle carrot plants have shoulders!
The largest carrots were only four inches long, but it’s clear they would not have grown longer. Regardless, they taste grand as all fresh, young carrots do.
More Small Kitchen Garden Carrots
This carrot experiment was very satisfying. You know what I did? I cut the top off of a three-liter soda bottle, filled it with soil, and planted some carrot seeds in it. This time, I planted fewer seeds… in a bigger container. There may be only 70 days remaining in our growing season, but I’m hoping to get bigger carrots from this planter than I got from the first one.
If I don’t? No matter. It’s still likely to produce a handful of three-bite carrot snacks. Not bad for such a small kitchen garden.
As my soda bottle carrots slide out of the planter, I feel considerable heat in the soil. I’ve often touched the side of the planter to gauge whether it was overheating in direct sunlight, but it has never felt as hot as the soil does in my hand. I suspect being pot-bound was only half the stress my carrots experienced. The insulating plastic of the soda bottle concealed from me the extent of the greenhouse effect taking place around the carrots’ roots. The root ball has me musing about growing pre-formed sod bricks… it would be so much easier than cutting them out of prairie grass.
I always marvel that so much of what matters in life involves dirt. No, OK, I’m a purist: I grow food in soil. But when soil ends up on your hands, your clothing, your kitchen floor, or YOUR FOOD, it’s dirt. These little snackers are sweet and delicious.
More thoughts on growing carrots in a small kitchen garden
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Grow your own in local skips – Gardeners are being encouraged to grow carrots in skips on building sites and tomatoes in hospital car parks under new plans to increase the amount of land available for grow-your-own vegetables. The Government is setting up a national …
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How to Grow Carrots – How to grow carrots in the vegetable garden: fresh-carrots. carrots like a sunny spot; dig soil in autumn & break soil down to fine, crumbly seedbed before sowing. carrot-bed. sow outdoors from March to August – if in March cover with …
I wondered how these would turn out! Thanks for sharing this fascinating experiment.
Do you think you could grow carrots like this on a windowsill during the winter? It would be neat to grow a little salad in the kitchen during the cold months when I am longing for the summer garden.
Daisy: Thank you for checking back to see. I’ll probably mess with this approach on into next season and try to come up with a “best practices” list for soda bottle carrot planters.
Dava: Two challenges with winter windowsill gardening: 1. There really isn’t enough sunlight to get vegetable plants to store food (and so, make vegetables). 2. Windowsills can be pretty cold, and that can slow down growth.
That said, I think soda bottle carrot planters would produce snacking carrots over the winter if you provide supplemental lighting, and if you keep the soil temperature at at least 70F degrees.
Carrots don’t mind a little cold, so the 70 degrees isn’t mandatory, but the cooler the soil, the more likely you’ll still be waiting for carrot shoulders to form as the temperature rises in the spring.
Tell you what: I’ll plant soda bottle carrots on my south-facing windowsill in October and write about its progress in this blog. I’d be thrilled to hear about it if you do the same.
-Daniel
Good post. There are benefits to the dreaded soil though, as it contains a whole array of microbes that assist digestion, or so I am told.
Great pictures and article! I want a small herb garden, but didn’t want to start digging up the clay soil. Using soda bottles as containers will work. We have big window sills!
Great information. I’m collecting garden ways of reusing plastic bottles. One question: Were there drainage holes in your bottle?
Lynn: Thanks for visiting! Yes, I gave complete details on creating the soda bottle carrot planter back in May: Carrots in Containers. Since my soda bottle planter lived outdoors, I didn’t need a bowl or basin to catch the runoff. Of course, we had so much rain this year that a container without drainage holes would have been a swamp. I wrote about drainage holes here: Container Garden Drainage.
good to see carrots with soil on!