Uberlandia and Beyond: Annual Flowering Carrots

Plants
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Hello ECHO community, I am making this post to share some info and open up a dialogue about carrots. ECHO has historically distributed Uberlandia carrot as well as an additional Uberlandia strain that had some improvement/selection. Besides this, there is hardly any information available about carrot varieties that defy the typical biennial flowering cycle. This flowering scheme makes seed production impossible in tropical environments, as well as where I reside here in Florida without vernalization practices. This leaves small farmers (and me) reliant on seed companies in far away lands, unable to produce their own seed. An additional downside to the seed expense is that since the seed is purchased from far away each season, adaptation to the growing environment is not happening each season with saved seed on that particular farm.

I have a small seed company (Cody Cove Farm and Nursery) and am interested in producing carrot seed for my seed catalogue. Part of our project is to only offer varieties where customers can save their own seeds, hence the need for annual flowering carrot types.

I haven’t grown Uberlandia carrot anytime recently and will be evaluating that carrot this fall from a few different sources. It would be excellent to find more varieties that can produce seed in tropical and subtropical environments. Uberlandia is reported to have acceptable but not fantastic eating quality. Perhaps there are others that may have better culinary traits. Other colors would also be fantastic. My own hopes are to bring together a few lines and make a diverse color gene pool with good flavor, nice size and annual flowering habit.

In my research, I have found some varieties that may be of interest to the ECHO network. Though Uberlandia originates in Brazil, India seems to be an epicenter of tropical carrot lines. Though literature mentions many, I am just sharing a few here that are available in the US with some ease. There’s quite a few accessions in the USDA GRIN gene bank from India, including some tagged as “annual” in their description. Curiously, USDA GRIN does not host any Brazilian accessions.

Here are some available varieties (all Indian) that may have the annual flowering habit of Uberlandia -

Pusa Rudhira - currently available from Kattula Family Farms seed company

Pusa Asita - currently available from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Pusa Kerala - currently available from Seeds of India

Do you know any varieties that behave this way?

ECHO has published a guide on carrot breeding/selection of Uberlandia. Here I am sharing a 97 minute carrot breeding lecture from the Organic Seed Alliance that has excellent information and hands on footage of selection. For anyone looking to go deeper than the short guide ECHO previously published, this is an excellent resource from experts in this very niche topic. I plan to reach out to some of the panelists to inquire about tips for breeding carrots for tropical environments. The video can be found here - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdsg2NSPZ0w&ra=m

Thanks!

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Greetings Josh,

Thanks for the helpful info on carrots. I live with my family in high elevation rural Haiti (so essentially a subtropical climate) and part of what we are doing here is agricultural development. I think our climate is well suited to carrots but one problem we foresee is that wild carrots are one of the most common weeds here. We haven’t been sure how we could produce seed here without ending up with a lot of cross contamination. I realize you may not deal with the same issues in central Florida but wondered if you or others might have any ideas on how realistic it would be to save seed in such a context. I think even if we cleared our entire 4 hectares of land of every last wild carrot (which would be a huge task), our neighbors won’t get rid of theirs. I haven’t been sure what kind of distance we would need to be able to keep our seed from reverting to wild strain.

On an unrelated note, I found your seed company recently because I was looking for some rare plants or cultivars that I’m hoping to introduce here (especially Persia aculeata and edible leaf mulberry). I tried contacting the email address listed on your website because it wasn’t clear if you shipped to US addresses outside of Florida but I never got a response and wonder if it ended up in your spam folder. Both of these plants I mentioned are high on my list to introduce here as we see a lot of protein malnutrition and I’m trying to work on introducing high protein perennials as part of the long term solution to that. If there was some way I could arrange to buy those from you, I would be very grateful.

Joel