Must-Know Tips Before Growing Carrots Indoors

Gardeners don't usually grow carrots (Daucus carota) indoors, yet both novice and intrepid food growers sometimes try their hand at this technique anyway. Their motivations may be to start seedlings for later transplanting, to remove the constraint of a very short growing season, or to regrow carrot tops. But if some gardeners find carrots to be one of the most difficult vegetables to grow in the garden, it follows that it's even harder to grow them indoors. For starters, these root vegetables need full sun, so indoor gardeners must grow them in a sunroom with very high light exposure or plan to use a strong set of grow lights positioned a few inches above the seedlings.

Also, when sowing carrot seeds in a pot or planter, growers need to make sure the container is deep enough to accommodate the length of the variety's roots throughout the entire growing process, as carrots don't like to be transplanted. Even with these tips, growing these orange root vegetables inside tends to be a bad idea — in fact, carrots are usually considered one of the plants you shouldn't start growing indoors.

While tomatoes and peppers can get off to a great start indoors, sowing carrot seeds indoors and transplanting them out into bigger containers, rows, or raised beds is usually unsuccessful. That's because the roots of these plants are sensitive and don't like to be transplanted — young seedlings transplanted from nursery pots into garden soil will either wither and die or become deformed, making food prep much trickier.

Plus, it can be difficult to achieve the high light exposure indoors that's available outside, where full sun exposure will provide this crop with the energy it needs to produce big, beautiful roots. Direct sowing into garden soil will also make growing carrots a breeze. In case you were wondering, whether grown indoors or outdoors, carrot tops can be placed in water to resprout new greens, but a long tap root will not grow back once severed.