Carrots...woody core

[garye]

Hi folks,

After lifting a few baby carrots/thinnings a couple of weeks ago (all of which were delicious) I decided to lift my first real batch today. Some were reasonable size, others were a bit small.....however before cooking some were a bit difficult to cut and even after cooking as normal about 3/4 of them had a hard woody core. Can anybody shed any light on this at all? They were planted in a polytunnel towards the end of February.

Cheers

[diggernotdreamer]

There could be a few reasons for this happening, I would guess that they are starting to flower, maybe the foliage on the woody ones was starting to look a bit bigger and stronger. I have had this happen to carrots in the tunnel and I am not 100 per cent sure, but I think it may have been a combination of not enough watering and periods of alternating very cold and very hot weather spells that we seem to have had the last couple of years, makes the onions in the tunnel bolt too, I now keep shading material to hand so if the weather suddenly gets boiling hot I can quickly cover crops like onions, carrots and lettuce.

[Odsox]

I totally agree.
A plant's raison d'etre is to multiply, which in most cases means setting seed. If a plant "thinks" it's going to die early, then even if it's the wrong season, it will do it's best to flower and set seed before it dies.
It can happen to quite a few biennials, onions, carrots and especially fennel, water too much, water too little, too hot, too cold, they can be some picky individuals sometimes.