Hitting 'The Carrot Lottery'

After searching for some carrot growing tips to ease my personal carrot struggle I came upon this joyous little piece titled "Lottery winner plans to grow better carrots". (Enjoy!) http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090616/od_nm/us_lottery

Now back to my carrot troubles. Figure 4 is not my problem, nor will it ever be if I can't get the dang things to grow. You see, I went to the trouble of making a special mix for my carrots. They have a nice deep bed made with fine sand and loam. We removed the obvious rocks by hand with every wheelbarrow load that went in. There is not too much nitrogen or organic matter to cause 'forking' and the soil is well drained thanks to all that sand. I have a special planting method that I covered back in May, and I am sure to keep the stinkers moist for the first few weeks.


This lone carrot ranger is all that has survived out of the latest 16 seeds sowed. Pitiful.




I do have others growing in a separate section. Keep in mind I began sowing carrot seeds on April 18th, and have had many, many failures along the way.

Only 4 or 5 carrots survived out of the first hundred or so seeds. Luckily the batch behind them actually seems to be doing OK (me, knocking on wood), so I guess I just need to be patient.

The reason behind the disapearing carrot is a still a mystery to me. Rabbits? Slugs? Bad JuJu? I know others have had there own carrot struggles and if there is anything you have learned along the way, please share it here.......this girl has yet to hit the lottery.