How to grow carrots in raised beds

One of the best ways to grow your own carrots

Growing carrots in raised beds means you can access a wide variety of shapes, colours and tastes! So whether long and thin, short and stumpy or round, orange, purple, white, yellow and red: growing your own will introduce you to a whole new world of carrots (and not just the basic orange ones that fill the bags in the supermarket). Plus, you can eat them straight from the garden when these beautiful vegetables are at their sweetest!

Growing carrots in raised beds

Because of their depth, raised beds are fantastic for growing root veg like carrots and parsnips as they allow the roots to grow long and straight. Open soil can be compact in places giving the roots a harder job of establishing themselves, this results in splitting and tangled shaped carrots. Raised beds will have less compaction, which means the soil will be much airier, and easy for the roots to grow downward, resulting in much smoother growth.

The benefits of growing carrots in raised beds

Better soil conditions - less compaction
Easy sowing and harvesting
Easy watering and weeding
Raised beds warm up quicker in the summer and retaining heat for longer when the temperature drops

Best raised bed height for growing carrots and vegetables

If you are building your bed on soil and plan to grow root vegetables, you can select a minimum height of 0.25m. For raised beds built directly onto hard surfaces such as patios, paving and concrete, we recommend a minimum height of 0.45m to allow for drainage and to avoid growing stumpy carrots.

The most popular raised bed heights amongst our customers tends to be 0.45m and 0.55m - this allows plenty of depth for growing plus there's less bending and no need for kneeling making sowing, growing and watering really easy.

Use our handy raised bed calculator to get the perfect height, size and shape for you and your garden.

Best raised bed height for growing vegetables

What variety of carrot should you plant?

Here are Thompson and Morgan’s top six carrot varieties, all are versatile and easy to grow in raised beds.

Carrot flyaway F1 - pest resistance

Specifically developed to provide resistance against carrot root fly making it much less likely that your crop will succumb to the pests.

Carrot Nigel - flavour and storage

Smooth skinned with a good flavour, these carrots are heavy croppers and store very well over winter.

Carrot Sugarsnax - super-sweet and full of vitamins

Super sweet both raw and cooked, high in beta carotene, long and tapered with uniform roots

Carrot Sweet candle - best for late summer/early autumn harvest

This almost coreless Japanese carrot variety will crop late summer/early autumn, it’s sweet and brightly coloured too

Carrot Purple Haze - best salads

Deep purple skin and bright orange flesh makes this variety very interesting. It is best eaten raw as coking can impair the flavour, it’s sure to be a showstopper when served.

Carrot Rainbow - grow an array of shades

Grow a wide range of carrot shades ranging from yellow to orange, packed with vitamins, use to brighten salad dishes.

What soil conditions do carrots grow best in?

Raised beds are ideal for growing carrots. If you’ve ever been wooed by the enormously long specimens seen at village shows please note that these are carrots grown in sand and have probably been planted in drainpipes!

There’s no need to go that far for the veg for your Sunday lunch, but the principle is the same. Carrots will fork, bend and generally distort in stony, lumpy and heavy soil. Growing in a raised bed means you can give carrots the perfect growing conditions, whether the beds are standing on a hard surface or just raising the soil level a bit over the top of the garden soil. Just make sure your carrot rows are not directly above any buttresses inside your WoodBlocX planters!

The lighter the soil the better for carrots, so don’t add any manure or other compost the same year you sow them (though the previous autumn is fine). A good peat-free multipurpose compost and stone-free topsoil are both ideal for growing carrots.

Growing carrots in raised beds - How and when

The best time to grow carrots in the UK is Spring. Carrots are best sown direct into the soil (i.e. not raised in individual pots or plugs then planted out), as is true of most root crops.
When you’re ready to plant carrot seeds, scrape out a shallow drill – a line in the soil – and water the bottom of it before sprinkling the seeds thinly along it. You want one seed about every centimetre, but there’s no need to be exact!
Brush the soil you scraped out back over the top of the seeds and pat down gently. Most importantly, label the row with the variety and the date you sowed it.
Water, using a rose on the end of your watering can or a spray hose – this helps prevent the seeds being washed out of their line, if the weather is dry you will need to keep the soil moist, not wet.

Once the seedlings have poked up some leaves, wait for a few weeks before pulling one up to check the root size. At a 1cm spacing the carrots are too close together to give a good harvest, and will need thinning to leave one every 5cm or so. However, if you wait until the roots are usable as baby veg, and take out every other plant until you reach the 5cm spacing, you’ll get several harvests from the same row.

Watch our video on how to grow carrots

When to harvest carrots

It’s possible to grow carrots for harvesting from early summer right through until autumn, and left in the ground some will even be fine to harvest into winter, such as ‘Autumn King’. Check the seed packets for the correct sowing and harvesting time for that variety so you have a succession of harvests and no major gluts.

If your rasied beds are relatively shallow it will be best to choose shorter or round varieties like the Nantes series and ‘Paris Market’, but beds with at least 45cm growing depth are fine for most carrot varieties. Some seed retailers offer packets of mixed seed, which is a good way to get a multi-coloured harvest, and there’s no need to choose a different type for each successional sowing, as most will be fine sown over a long period.

Caring for your carrots

Carrot pests

Growing carrots in raised beds in the UK means you’ll have less problems from carrot root fly as your plants are raised up above the level that they fly at, plus if you grow spring onions between your carrots it acts as a companion plant and discourages carrot fly.

Carrot food

To keep your carrots healthy and tasty, use a natural potassium rich vegetable or edible plant feed (liquid) or food (granular).

Growing carrots and edibles in raised beds

Growing carrots in a WoodBlocX raised bed is a great option; not only do you have a choice of shapes and sizes for your space, but you can also be assured that the treatment used to protect WoodBlocX will keep your structure strong for years to come.

Create the ultimate kitchen garden using our raised bed calculator, or if you can't find exactly what you need, we have a Free Design Service for projects of any size size.