When you have the right knowledge, growing your own veggies is pretty simple!
Plus, it’s something many people are interested in because it provides a sense of self-sufficiency.
It wil be a challenge to grow your own veggies as it requires some knowledge about how some vegetables grow.
The last thing you want to do is grow a lot of veggies and find out they aren’t edible.
Carrots have a risk of bolting, but can you eat carrots that have bolted.
No, it is not recommended to eat carrots that have bolted. The carrot will be very fibrous and woody and not edible.
Bolting usually happens from unexpected climate, and while you can’t prevent carrots from bolting you can do some things to provide some assurances for at least some success of your crop.
What Is Bolting And What Causes It?
Bolting is when a plant rushes through its growth cycle faster than normal.
For carrots, this rush means that they will flower and go to seed much earlier than expected.
Bolting is often initiated by a cold snap. This commonly occurs when juvenile plants are affected by an unwelcome cool snap in the first part of spring.
You will find that some carrots are more prone to bolting, such as:
- Purple carrot
- And Kuroda carrots
What is interesting is the reason some carrots, and other plants, bolt.
It is a survival strategy whereby the plant attempts to produce the next generation of seed, when the current conditions threaten continued existence.
For example, a cold snap.
A carrot that has bolted is fairly easy to identify because one of the first things you will experience in this bolting process, is the plant is beginning to flower.
Carrots are biennial plants, which means they have a two-year life cycle:
- An annual plant would typically flower within their first season, while biennial plants such as carrots, would typically flower the second year.
- Carrots will also bolt to an unexpected period of premature warm weather.
This is also common in spring, and can trick the carrots to release seed energy much earlier than normal.
Can You Eat Bolted Carrots?
If you’ve been excited to cooking a meal with your home grown carrots only to see that they have bolted, we feel your pain.
With that said, it is also worth mentioning that there is no assiciated health risk from eating bolted carrots, so no one is putting you in danger.
In terms of eating them, they won’t taste very good and you are going to experience an annoying texture so you are probably not going to eat them.
Once the carrots start to send their flowers, the main part of the plant – which is the part we eat – literally becomes almost unrecognizable in texture. It starts to become woodier, more fibrous and more tough and it is clearly no longer a carrot.
So it is basically impossible to eat but you also need to think that the carrot will not only have possibly lost all of its nice buttery carrot taste but the carrot might even turn bitter.
That said, if you are fortunate, and you manage to catch the plant in the earliest stage of bolting, you might actually be able to cut the flowers off and save the process. This is not going to give you 100% success, but it’s certainly going to give you a chance to salvage the crop.
You might even be lucky that the plant goes through its normal growing cycle and stops the bolting process.
In other cases you will find that cutting off the flowers will only give you a little longer to harvest the carrots before they go totally bad.
How Can I Stop My Carrots from Bolting?
One of the best things you can do to prevent bolting in carrots is choose varieties that bolt less often.
However, since bolt outbreaks happen, to some degree or another, with all kinds of carrot, how you sow them can be a big factor.
For example, you may notice that you can more adequately avert bolting by planting earlier in the spring.
By doing this, you will be ensuring that any susceptible carrots grow in late springs when frigid spells are less probable.
You may also plant them in the summer, so they grow, just as things are replacing fall.
As temperature relates to bolting greatly, it is important to keep the soil temperature even.
This is as simple as using some mulch and keeping it watered.
When you sow your carrots, space out your sowing as well:
- Do not sow all of your carrots on the same day, because when things bolt, it will likely happen to them all.
- Instead, consider several sowings of carrot plants over a few weeks. This way, they will all be at different points in their life cycles and depending on weather change and disruption, not all will bee affected.
Conclusion
Bolting is when carrots, and other plants, grow up quickly to go to seed.
This usually occurs when juvenile carrots are exposed to cool or warm weather at the wrong time.
You can plant carrots in a way to avoid it, but it isn’t always avoidable.
That being said, it also may be possible to simply cut the flowers off to give yourself more time to harvest the crop.