Bucket carrots? Tell me more. I have heavy acidic soil and they don’t do well here. I was going to build a raised bed but buckets sounds easier.
We also have some very heavy soil in spots and my garden is in an area that tends to have water pond on it if it’s really wet out. Plus rocks. This is NH. Rocks grow best here.
Mr. mm cut the bottoms off some typical food grade buckets, the kind you can get from grocery stores in their bakery. We just made sure they weren’t used for paint or plaster, or whatever. Even new ones from Home Depot for example, although I prefer to scavenge them instead of buying them.
Then I made a mixture of peat moss, well composted manure, a little bit of sand, and you could throw in some spent potting soil from houseplants you repotted, or maybe just some regular dirt. With it being so well mixed with the rest of the stuff, it’s heaviness won’t be an issue.
I mix it well and put fill up the bucket and plant the seeds in there. They did fairly well. The buckets don’t need to be taller than however long your carrots are supposed to grow, obviously. I figure there is no point in wasting the mix by over filling buckets.
The only thing to watch for is them drying out. If you are in a dry spell, you will need to be aware of that.
I do something similar for my potatoes only use wood chips instead. This year mr. mm cut up some culvert pipe he replaced, and I plan on trying that.
I lay the potatoes directly on the ground inside the bucket, add some bone meal, and then cover the seed potatoes with wood chips. As the plants grow, I add more wood chips.
This year with the culvert pipe ones, since they are deeper, I am going to try two layers of potatoes offset from each other. Once the first set of plants is far enough along, I will add another layer of soil, some more manure and bone meal, and then put in another set of seed potatoes.
Maybe I can get a double crop from each bucket.
The bucket potatoes I grew last year did very well. They were a nice size and came out very clean. The ones I had in the ground got half eaten by slugs. UGH!
Seems like the slugs do not like crawling through wood chips.
Rumor has it that if you bury the potato plants deep, they will produce potatoes all the way up the buried part of the stem. I have never found that to happen, and Ellendra says that no, it does not happen.