Carrots bolting - saving seed?

I've got a couple of patches of carrots in the ground this year and with the week of 90+ weather we had at the end of June (zone 5a in the mountains), some of the carrots are bolting. It's a purple variety, planted back in April. Everything I've seen online and in seed saving resources says not to save seed from bolting carrots but never gives a reason why. Is is because we want to try and get a harvest from the roots? Is it because the flowers will be sterile? Is it just the done thing? Is it too inconsistent for seed production?

We breed and use leafy greens that bolt so why not carrots?

Not all of the carrots in that variety are bolting and some of the others aren't bolting at all. I need to actually harvest carrots at some point but I won't be back to my field until this weekend.

I'm curious if anyone has ever done anything with them. I'm probably going to try and save them, just for fun and see what happens. Maybe they just produce carrots that bolt every summer. But maybe they just produce normal carrots. That would be a neat thing, having a carrot patch that bolts so you get seed production that produces normally. Not sure how consistent it would be but the carrots are just fun and food for me.

Thoughts?

I believe the reason is because you'd be saving and perpetuating the genes that lead to early bolting.  So if you save those bolting seeds and next year have another hot summer, maybe ALL the carrots will bolt on you and you won't get much of a harvest.

Now for self-pollinating crops (like lettuce?) I'm not sure if saving bolting seeds matters because the genes are set already and you aren't doing much selection.  I think...

A bolting carrot has a hard/fibrous root, that is not palatable to me.

I don't save seeds from carrots that bolt during their first year, because I want the root to have a whole growing season to swell and get larger. Once the flower stalk starts forming, the root becomes tough and inedible to me. Yield is tiny on carrots that bolt after a few months growth.

Cold temperatures often trigger carrots to start flowering in their first year... Seems to me, that it's in the ballpark of 20 F. For that reason, I don't plant carrots super early in the spring. I treat them more as a mid-spring crop.

When someone starts saving seeds, they become a plant breeder. If seeds are saved from carrots that bolt in their first year, they will be tending towards plants that bolt the first year, and turn inedible at a younger age. Or that are more susceptible to being triggered into bolting by spring frosts.

Plant breeders put tremendous effort into selecting for leafy greens that are slow to bolt.

I'm curious if anyone has ever done anything with them.

For me, it's Cull, cull, cull, cull.

Now I'm wondering if there's a use for those culled seeds? Coriander is seeds of cilantro which is in the same family of plants. Do carrots seeds have their own spice characteristic?

Yes, save those seeds.  I've done so for years and haven't bought carrot seeds in a long long time.  

Its important that the carrots continue to get water, even though they've bolted.  Continue to give them regular irrigation so that the seeds can fully fill out.  You'll get multiple seed heads from each carrot it you do so.  Wait until the seed heads have turned completely brown, and then they are very easy to harvest: just snip off the seeds head into a big bowl or bucket.  Once the carrot is no longer producing seed heads (or you've got more than enough seeds for next year), you can cut the carrot off at the soil level, leaving the carrot in the ground to feed the soil microbes.

I keep my seeds in a paper bag so that they can continue to dry (if they are not completely dry already).

When it comes to planting, you'll have so many seeds that you'll be able to broadcast your seed rather than have to carefully drop one seed into a row at a time.  

Cultivated carrots will cross with wild Queen Anne's Lace - they are both the same species.  Queen Anne's Lace has not been selected for the table; those hybrids will have small and tough roots and flower early in the same season.

Many commercial varieties are intentional hybrids between specific parental varieties created using a male sterile background.  When the offspring bloom, there is no pollen to self and any seeds result from pollen from another source.  If that is Queen Anne's Lace, then none of the offspring will have the cultivated carrot characteristics that most folks desire.  I think that's another part of the reason folks say not to save seed from carrots.

Both male-fertile and male-sterile purple carrots are available commercially, and you can tell the difference by examining the umbels carefully.  All this is to say you can save carrot seeds (I do) but you can also figure out ahead of time what your chances of success will be!

Where do you suppose the seeds you buy in the packet come from. They don't fall off the back of the turnip truck. Now I'll agree that some are hybrid, but 40% of carrot varieties sold in the Burpee catalog are heirloom seeds. The bad news is the purple ones they sell are hybrid. I've seen hybrid seed, tomatoes, turn out as cherry tomatoes. However I've had volunteers come up the following year from Celebrity, a "hybrid", tomato that I couldn't tell from the originals.

I say go for it. save some seeds see what happens. The worst that can happen is that you get Queen Ann's lace flowers on top of sweet delicious carrots.   .....I'm kidding.

Phil Gardener wrote:Both male-fertile and male-sterile purple carrots are available commercially, and you can tell the difference by examining the umbels carefully.  

Male sterile carrot flowers don't have anthers. Without anthers, they don't make pollen.


Male fertile carrot flowers look very masculine, and produce healthy looking anthers:

I don't save seeds from carrots that bolt during their first year, because I want the root to have a whole growing season to swell and get larger. Once the flower stalk starts forming, the root becomes tough and inedible to me. Yield is tiny on carrots that bolt after a few months growth.  

Okay! I figured there had to be a reason why. I just haven't done much with carrots except eat them when they were ready. I've also never seen them bolt in the first year before.

When someone starts saving seeds, they become a plant breeder. If seeds are saved from carrots that bolt in their first year, they will be tending towards plants that bolt the first year, and turn inedible at a younger age. Or that are more susceptible to being triggered into bolting by spring frosts.  

I've done a lot of reading about plant breeding but book learning can only take me so far. The hardest thing for me to remember is that I can breed for negative traits, even by accident. I've done a little bit of seed saving on annuals like peas and beans and the biennial bolting definitely confused me!

Thanks everyone!

Natasha Flue wrote:The hardest thing for me to remember is that I can breed for negative traits, even by accident.

I do a lot of inadvertent plant breeding: Selecting for traits that I didn't know I was selecting for... Things like earliness are obvious. Other traits are not so simple to observe. For example, one year, I trialed a whole bunch of new tomato varieties. They sucked, cause the fruits would lay on the ground and rot... (I don't trellis tomatoes). That caused me to really observe my tomatoes to see what was going on... I had inadvertently been selecting for tomatoes that stood more upright, and kept the fruits off the ground. If they don't touch the ground, then they don't experience ground-rot.

One year I introduced the "exploding fruits" trait into my watermelons. Ooops. While it's a fun trait, and I'm glad that it played in my garden, I didn't feel inclined to keep it in the population.

Must be going around. I planted some black-skinned radishes from seed and had one of 'em bolt already at 4-5 weeks old. :(  Didn't have any carrots bolt tho some of the onions did.

All vegetable are hybrids, breeder started crossing them in the 1700,1800 & 1900's.
I have a book that tells the history of breeder in Europe & North America.
So heirlooms are all stable hybrids, even if they were first bought in 1700's.
I think saving carrot seeds is a good ideal.
If you grow corn on both sides of the seed plants it will make it hard for the crossing of wild plants.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:One year I introduced the "exploding fruits" trait into my watermelons. Ooops. While it's a fun trait, and I'm glad that it played in my garden, I didn't feel inclined to keep it in the population.

I had exploding watermelons this year. They'd get about marble-sized, then BOOM. Turns out it's not the watermelon, it's slugs. Slug chews a hole in the rind, which compromises structural integrity and the whole thing comes apart -- evidently being under internal pressure. Was able to tell on some because I could see the chew marks, and also had chew marks on smaller ones that just cracked instead of going kablooie. And caught some slugs in the act. (What's good for warding off slugs? Read up on all the usual methods and turns out when actually tested, they're mostly myths.) So I lost a few. But the ones the slugs didn't get to are about baseball-sized and are fine, from the same plants

Rez Zircon wrote:What's good for warding off slugs? Read up on all the usual methods and turns out when actually tested, they're mostly myths.) So I lost a few. But the ones the slugs didn't get to are about baseball-sized and are fine, from the same plants

Ducks! I have crazy amounts of slugs, living in a damp climate by a wetland. I couldn't grow much of anything until I got ducks. Now I can't find a slug if I want to!

Aside from ducks, Sluggo is the only thing that really worked. Supposedly it's organic and a soil amendment. Another thing that worked pretty well was lots of coffee grounds. But, even those just slowed the slugs down a bit.

Some years ago me and my gardening cohort planted some Danvers from Seeds of Change. We got lots of yummy carrots but left about 4 to bolt, which they did. After they dried we got hundreds and hundreds of seed, many of which we gave away. The next year we planted some and got lots of yummy carrots again. As did those who planted those seeds. We had so many seeds that I put them in tiny zip-lock bags and gave them to my friend who works farmer's markets. She gave them away - "Free w/ purchase." She said that a lot of people didn't even know that carrots came from seeds!

So, start with a good heirloom and let a few go, but do keep them away from Queen Anne's Lace. I've never heard of a 2nd year carrot anyway.