Beginnings and experiments - January carrots

The first seeds have been sown.

You're not supposed to sow vegetable seeds in January as a rule - too cold, too damp, not enough sun and any gardener who gets overenthused and sows too early will get nothing but disappointment and sickly seedlings that are starved of sunlight. I know this mostly cause I did it last year, but it's very hard not to. Winter's back is broken, the sun's coming out again (in patches) and the month of January is filled with preparation of beds, acquiring of compost and planning of where everything's going to go. All of the seed packets you ordered have arrived and it's very hard not to jump the gun and get right down to it in the hope that the weather will have picked up by the time you come to plant out, right?

I'm attempting to stop myself from giving in this year by giving in in a very controlled fashion and experimenting with indoor carrots.

Carrots are supposed to germinate at 10⁰C, but air temperatures outside at the moment are wavering from freezing to a max of 11⁰C, which is far from ideal. Quite apart from that, soil temperatures in the ground and raised beds won't warm up for at least a month without help. So my theory goes that maybe if you plant them in pots, in an area that will always be >10⁰C, you might be able to trick them into thinking that it's February/March (when you're supposed to plant them). Our baby daughter is going to be looking to try out solid food for the first time in a month or so and it would be lovely if we could start her with some homegrown carrot.

I've got two experiments on the go at once for this. The first is inside my raggedy plastic greenhouse thing, which in theory should trap heat and lead to a warmer air temperature than that outside. This works in theory and would probably work a lot better if the plastic greenhouse weren't riddled with holes. We live on top of a very steep hill and when the wind blows, it howls, so the plastic greenhouse has been wired down in several different ways since it was bought last year and each tiny hole for wiring has allowed erosion to eat away at the plastic cover. Frankly, I'm a little dubious as to how insulating it might be compared to, say, a colander, but it's all I have at the moment. The pot is swaddled in bubble wrap as an insulator and hopefully it'll be slightly warmer than if it were just outside.

The second is actively indoors, on a table near a window. This has the advantage of being guaranteed to be above 10⁰C, but the disadvantage of not getting a brilliant amount of light. We don't have any south facing windows in our house (being semi-detached) and growing things on windowsills has proven a challenge before. My hope is that carrots don't need a huge amount of sunlight in their early days and that the weather will pick up enough/they'll grow strong enough for me to put the pot outside before they suffer too much.

In theory, it should work. Maybe there's a reason that back garden gardeners don't grow carrots inside and maybe I'll find out, but as for now, it's an adventure and it's saved me from the urge to plant anything else too early.

PJW