How to Regrow Carrot Tops

Hey there, I'm Nicole Burke owner of Gardenary and Rooted Garden and creator of the Kitchen Garden Academy.

Today, I want to teach you how to regrow carrots. At least that's what they promised on Pinterest. Right? That you can regrow carrots and you'll never have to buy carrots again from the grocery. Well today, I'm going to tell you about that magic in this project. 

All you need for this one is some carrots with the greens attached and organic if possible, a scary knife and some water, and a nice flat bowl. A bowl that's got a good not too dirty and a good circumference that's got plenty of space. 

This is super simple. All we're going to do is take our knife and we're going to cut about an inch down on the carrot top. So we're just going to cut right there leaving about an inch. Then what we're going to do is peel back these leaves a little bit and making sure that we keep the center one.

We don't cut too much off the center and we're just going to cut right there. So right about an inch of green so I'm not going to show you this because you might get scared. Okay, so that's what we got and we're just going to do that again. You'll do that for all your carrots until you get a nice little bowl.

Can you guys see this like this? So I've got all my little carrot tops arranged right here.

Now in the next few days what's going to start happening is some of your little carrots are going to start to sprout. So these are ones where I left the greens on and these are ones where I did not so what's going to happen is these will actually sprout faster and you're going to start to get new green growth in the center.

So, I don't know if you can see this one, but this one's been here a little bit and we're getting this new tiny baby carrot leaf coming out right from the center. So in about a week or more, you'll start to get those from all of your carrot babies. So if you peel back you can start to see the new little leaf unfurling right there in the center of the carrot super cool.

So in a few weeks, it's going to take a while you're going to end up with greens coming out of these carrots that are about I don't know five, six inches high. Super exciting right? Now Pinterest lied to you. You're never going to get a new carrot. So the root will never grow, but you will get some good greens.

Now the greens may not taste appealing to everyone but to me the greens taste a lot like parsley, they actually taste a lot like carrot.

So you can pull some off, give it a little crunch and see what you think about it. It's very carrot-y. So a couple things you can do with these greens is you can make carrot pesto, you can make chimichurri.

My favorite thing to do with them is chop them up just like I would fresh parsley and toss them into soup.

You need some water to make it go down. I have officially gotten my carrot nutrition for the day.

So there are three things we can learn from this fun project.

Number one, is that what is going up on above the ground in your garden is indicative of what's happening below the ground. So if you check out this carrot besides the fact that the greens are very well, you can tell that greens are twice the size of your carrot.

Oftentimes, we have clients who call us and say, “When do I know if the carrots are ready?” ”How do I know if the carrots are ready?” And one of the best ways is to look at the greens. So if the greens aren't big and full and really tall, then you know that your carrot hasn't grown very deep either. This is true for carrots, but it's really true for all plants in the kitchen garden. The roots matter so much and when you look at a plant and you're wondering like, “oh that looks really weak or spindly or it's having trouble,” nine times out of ten, the roots are having trouble first. 

The second lesson, we can learn from carrots is that they don't take up much space, but they do take a lot of time. So unlike romaine lettuce where we're harvesting for the leaves, with carrots, unless you fall in love with the carrot greens, then you're not harvesting for the leaves you're harvesting for the root and the root is just going to take longer to grow. It makes sense. Right?  I mean this went pretty darn deep into the ground and it started from a teeny teeny tiny seed. Carrots are usually going to take about three months in the garden and if they're not getting a lot of sun they're going to take longer than that. So carrots take up a little space. 

This thing is going to take up less than 2 to 3 inches in the garden. So this means in a big square foot you could fit say 16 carrots if you wanted to. Not a lot of space but a lot of time. 

The third thing that we can learn from this project is when you grow your own food you get to enjoy so much more of the plant than you do when you just buy it from the grocery store. So when we buy these from the grocery store you can see I'm not going to want to eat the greens because they look horrible. But when I pull carrots straight from my garden, the greens are lush and fresh and so delicious. So the more that I can do in my kitchen garden, the more I'm going to get to enjoy the fullness of the foods rather than the typical little carrot that I get from the grocery store.

The more that we can grow inside the garden right outside of our back door the more that we're going to get to experience the fullness of the vegetables and the foods that are so good for our bodies and the taste is going to be so much better. Because, I mean I can talk to you about carrot-top pesto all you want but I'm not sure you're going to want to make it with this. Alright. 

Those are the three lessons number one. What's above the ground is indicative of what's below the ground, that's the first lesson. The second lesson is that carrots don't take up a lot of space but they do take up a lot of time because they've got to grow this deep and this tall. The final lesson is that when you grow your own food you get to enjoy so much more of the vegetable and plant parts. A lot of the foods that we grow, so much more of the plant is edible than just the thing that they sell at the grocery store.

So, take the challenge, do this. Regrow your carrot magic. Let's see how many carrot tops you can get off of the carrots that you got from the grocery.