Producing baby carrots

Baby carrots can take various forms, and these change over time due to marketing and customer response

- Bill Kerr.

A very attractive baby carrot type is Amsterdam carrots, which are small, cylindrical carrots looking like fingers. They are usually sweet and perhaps the ideal type for farmers which wish to produce for this niche market. These carrots are ideal for hotels and restaurants.

Amsterdam types are earlier maturing than regular market varieties. Being small, there is more labour required for packing and preparation, but these types command a higher price to justify this and for the lower tonnage per hectare.

Being small and thin, they need to be planted at higher populations. A good way to achieve this, apart from setting the planter to sow closer together in the row, is to offset the planter to one side so that the one outer row is very close to the edge of the bed.

You then go back on the same bed from the opposite direction and the offset planter will now have the outer row on the opposite side of the bed.