But they can smell the carrots. Our garbage bin has already been bashed up once this week, by a wombat who feels that a cold winter equals carrots for wombats. Which it does, sometimes, but this week Ive had a cold, plus regular carrot feeding means we will eventually have 381 wombats waiting on our doorstep or finally defeating the garbage bin expecting carrots every day. Carrot delivery here is irregular and a treat.

Except for us. We get the ones inside that garden fence and truly gorgeous they are too. Well, half gorgeous. Their taste is superb, rich and sweet and earthy. They have so much carotene that if I add them to a tureen of tomato soup it becomes a deep orange colour.

On the other hand, they are also knobbly on the top, whiskery, and mostly forked. Despite 25 years of stating that carrots grow perfectly happily in beds that arent dug, just the surface soil ruffled a bit, I finally have to admit that if you want long, fat, straight carrots orange ones digging helps.

Round mini carrots dont mind firmish soil structure at all, and French round are still my favourite carrot, tender, sweet and cute. Peel them, boil in a very small amount of water with a tiny amount of butter and honey, until the water boils away and you are left with a slight glaze on the carrots, just slightly crunchy in the centre.

Heritage white and yellow carrots dont have any objections to forcing their way through the soil either, even in dry years. I suspect a yellow carrot could grow if you dropped a carrot seed in a crack in the pavement and crack the pavement too.

But, again to be honest, growing and then eating white and yellow carrots demonstrates why Dutch market gardeners developed long orange tender carrots instead of the hardier traditional white or yellow ones. Orange carrots taste better, have a better texture and like well-dug, deep, light soil. Except of course French round. Even purple and red-skinned carrots prefer their soil friable, though they too dont taste nearly as good as the more boring looking orange ones.

Why bother with carrots? Because you are truly a gardener when you can grow good carrots. They need planting at the right time, or you get all top and no bottom, or they go to seed before you get much carrot. You need to plant them in the right spot, as they rot in heavy, soggy soil, or if there is undigested organic matter or badly made compost (in which case you get smelly yuck, not compost).

You need to choose the correct variety, which is either French round or a modern, orange hybrid. And you need to feed perfectly, as if they get too much nitrogen you get lots of leaf and no carrot; if they get too little you dont get either leaf or carrot; and if you dont water they wont grow much either. Fluctuating dry and wet, and too much nitrogen, can mean your carrots grow big and fat, then split.

Perfect carrots mean a perfect garden. I have yet to achieve anything close to it (except with French round, yellow, purple, red, and white). Nor am I truly aspiring to the perfect carrot, as the chances of my digging the garden to a perfect, fine tilth instead of scattering the seed where the lyrebirds have dug up the lettuces is remote.

If everyone on this planet knew how to grow a perfect carrot, insisted on the plot to do it and spent their spare energy achieving it, the world would be happier. Well, a bit, in certain places, for a while. Not long at all really on a geological time frame, but worth a go. The wombats would be happier too.

If you want perfect carrots by this Christmas hunt out French round seed, or any other mini carrot, and wait till spring. If you want late summer perfect carrots, dig now, at least 30 centimetres deep, removing any stones or weed roots. Within the next month your bare patch will fill with small weeds. Remove them, dig again and wait another month for even more weed seeds to germinate. Carrot seed is small and so are the seedlings, and easily out-distanced by just about any weed (one of the reasons we call them weeds).

Wait till the soil is warm enough to sit on and not shift about uncomfortably, or for October 1, whichever comes latest. Dig again, mix one tablespoon of seeds with one cup of sand, scatter the seed on the bare ground and ruffle the soil a little so the seed is covered.

Water carefully, so the seed doesnt wash together and clump. Hope there are no thunderstorms too. Carrots can be transplanted, but most of them wont make it unless you are truly expert at carrot transplanting.

Hopefully, there will be enough residual fertility from a nice, well-fed crop of lettuce the previous year. But if not, feed regularly but sparely, about once a fortnight, or mulch with compost properly decomposed and water after every time. As soon as the seed comes up familiarise yourself with what a carrot seedling looks like the tiniest fern that soon bifurcates. It will seem very small indeed with a ridiculous amount of bare soil around it. Keep this rigorously bare till the carrots are at least 10 centimetres high (and hopefully deep).

You can tell how they are going by feeling their shoulders, not because carrots enjoy a massage (they dont) but their size is some indication of how big the roots are unless they have grown 10 centimetres deep then been stopped by a barrier of compacted soil or a rock.

If you really, truly long for a no-dig bed, you will need a pile of compost at least 60 centimetres deep, totally decomposed so you cant see any of the ingredients that went into it. If you see even the ghost of their shape it isnt fully composted yet. Plant as above, but as compost is a rich mix of ex-plant material, it should have the nutrients needed to make new ones. Unless of course, it was made of dry grasses or low nutrient autumn leaves. But if they were nice green lush weeds you, and your carrots, will be right.

Try the mini ones so you have some for Christmas (I try to have all our Christmas dinner veg as a celebration of the first carrots, beans and maybe even tomatoes of the season. Grow big long orange ones. And possibly a few of the yellow ones, just in case its a rotten season or you dont have time to feed and water.

They may not be the perfect carrot, but the wombats will love them anyway.

PS. Eat the carrots in your garden now, unless you plan to keep one or two for seed, in which case hammer a tomato stake next to them to tie up the seed head to stop it falling over in a thunder storm. Carrots wont go to seed until the soil really warms up, but around August they begin to toughen gradually, in preparation for fulfilling a carrots destiny, which according to carrots is to go to seed and produce more carrots, not provide a delicious and healthy addition to the human diet.

* Admiring yet another winter-blooming Climbing Ophelia bloom - suspect the regular trimming by the possums has upset its rhythms as now instead of blooming abundantly once each spring as it should. it gives a single rose followed by another single rose all year long.

* Thanking the lyrebirds for digging up the area that will be next years carrot patch.

* Picking oranges, eating oranges, and more oranges.

* Wondering why the protea isnt blooming yet (but not enough to feed it or give it a foliar fertiliser or even hunt for flower buds its cold in that patch of the garden).

* Adding chicken manure to the compost bins to speed them up a bit.

* Raking the last lot of leaves, not the autumn leaves but those of the white cedar (a native deciduous tree), which drops its leaves and stems in winter.

* Admiring the King parrots eating the Melia (white cedar) berries and the last of the crab apples.