Split Root Vegetables

This year for some reason, our root vegetables have split. I mixed a whole lot of seed and broadcast it then gave it a light rake.  Seems to have been very successful except for the problem with the splits.
Any help gratefully accepted.🙏

Hi Paul,
As far as carrots are concerned, I've only ever had issues with them splitting the other way from rocky soil. However, I have had quite a bit of experience with non-root vegetables cracking (particularly tomatoes), and those were often caused by water problems. Not enough and then too much, sort of thing. Google seems to suggest cracked root vegetables could be caused by the same problem... inconsistent water. Too much rain before or after a dry period. Do you recall how the weather was for you this season?

For the past 3 months I've been working on a new small farm food project (you can read about it in the Growies--Small Farm thread), and we have been growing some root crops. I have seen some root splitting and I'm not totally sure of the cause.  We run drip irrigation, often 5 times a week. Plus we saw more root splitting the week after a natural rain. So could it possibly be too much water? Possibly. Our crops get a light fertilization weekly in the form of compost teas, thus they are growing rapidly. So a combination of rapid growth and too much water might be the common cause. That's my best guess.

We saw some carrot splitting, perhaps one carrot out of 20 harvested. I would have expected to see it in just the larger carrots, but that wasn't the case. Splits occurred in all sizes. We sold the splits are "uglies" at half price.

We only had a small test plot of daikons, and out of the 20 harvested, 2 had splits.

We have a goodly amount of beets, perhaps 100 foot of row harvested so far. So that translates into perhaps 300-400 beets. I have seen a few split reds, a couple split whites, but more in the gold. About 5% of the golds have had split roots. So possibly the gold ones are more susceptible to splitting.

Though not a root crop, we grew kohlrabi. Right after the natural rain almost all the kohlrabi split. This something we will keep in mind for the next rain and take steps to protect the kohlrabi.

Hi Paul,
I would agree with Matt. My root vegetables have cracked occasionally, carrots, beets and radishes mostly. And yes, it's always when we've had heavy monsoon rains and the ground was seriously soaked for a few days. It looks like it cracked probably a few weeks or more than a month ago but continued to grow anyway. Nice size carrot! Congratulations!

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Paul,
As far as carrots are concerned, I've only ever had issues with them splitting the other way from rocky soil. However, I have had quite a bit of experience with non-root vegetables cracking (particularly tomatoes), and those were often caused by water problems. Not enough and then too much, sort of thing. Google seems to suggest cracked root vegetables could be caused by the same problem... inconsistent water. Too much rain before or after a dry period. Do you recall how the weather was for you this season?

Thanks Matt, Su and Debbie, we have had dry and then lots of rain, then repeat.  The younger carrots are doing well so far.  Wet might be the problem.  Our soil is rock free and very good clay loam
Cheers

Other than erratic watering the most common cause of carrot splitting is not harvesting in time, So if those carrots have been in the ground for more than 4 months I would expect a good proportion to be split, unless you specifically picked a carrot for inground storage, some of the Autum/winter types will last longer in the ground than a nantes type.