Okay, that is a enough for a nice, family newspaper. Let us just say that either there is a carrot conspiracy, trying to tempt me into growing the most obscene carrots ever not accepted by the Guinness Book of Records, or I am just not good at growing carrots.

I know I am not good at growing carrots. I don't dig, to begin with. I feel I have made sufficient contribution by giving our vegetables an (almost) weed-free spot to grow in, well mulched in the past and friable enough for any carrot with determination to get its own blasted root as far down as it needs to go, without lots of digging and loosening of the soil by me.

The carrots do not agree.

I've tried many varieties of carrot over the years. The only ones that have truly looked good are Ronde de Nice, a small, round, tender carrot that ripens early, and doesn't have to go too far down. Kids love them - they are just the right shape to eat in three or four happy crunches, and so sweet it is a crime to cook them, except they do look elegant peeled, boiled with just a tiny bit of olive oil or butter and a teaspoon of honey in the water, so you end up with brighter-than-orange carrots, all shiny and deeply yum.

I've grown yellow carrots, and white carrots, the ancestors of the orange carrots Dutch market gardeners developed a few centuries ago. They are okay - a bit tough. I've grown purple carrots, and red carrots, which are also on the stringy side but look very photographable if picked young and plated in an artistic manner. They taste okay, too, but trust me, they are grown mostly because they are photogenic, not delicious.

The best carrots, in fact, are the old-fashioned, big all season orange ones, or even the modern hybrids, the kind that give you a carrot with no character at all - unless grown in my garden, when, as I have explained, they become quite rude.

Carrots are fussy. They shouldn't be, as one of our standard vegetables. They should grow like radish - throw in the seed and crunch is the result three weeks later. But they don't. The seed can get washed away in a downpour, or if you water it too much, or the ants might carry it off (Add white pepper to the seed and ants will avoid it).

You will either plant too thickly, and carrots are hard to transplant well - you can do it, but they may bolt to seed, or wilt, or make you sorry you tried in many other ways. You may plant them too thinly, so they don't outgrow the weeds. A young carrot is a tiny, spindly wimp that withers if a weed looks at it. Carrot seed problems are why carrot seed dibblers were invented, so they are planted with the correct spacing - look at the back of the packet if you want to know that, as it will vary with each carrot variety.

Carrots need to be well-fed, or you won't get much top or bottom. If they are fed too well, they will be all lush leaves and no actual carrot to speak of. I assumed this year that I hadn't fed my carrots enough, because each row of the several varieties I tried this year looks distinctly underwhelming, not lush ferny growth at all, but a few strands like a bloke doing a desperate comb over. In other words: dud carrots.

Until I pulled one out. And no it wasn't obscene, or wrinkled, or whiskery or stunted. It was a big, beautiful, orange carrot, and I have no reason to believe the others are not as glorious.

Somehow, accidentally, I have the balance right with this year's carrots. They are goodies.

I'm also planting more carrots, because once you have grown your own - even if they are pale and misshapen and look like they are trying to grow a moustache - they will be so rich in carotene that adding one to your homegrown tomato soup will turn it orange instead of red, and the flavour is equally as overwhelming. It is impossible to have too many homegrown carrots, even if it means that you have Potage Crecy for lunch all through winter, which is posh French for carrot soup. I add carrots to my leek and potato soup, though given the colour, I should probably say I add leek and potato sometimes to my carrot soup.

READ MORE JACKIE FRENCH:

The only drawback to homegrown carrots is they have so much flavour that the skins can be a bit bitter. Supermarket carrots don't taste of anything much, until caramelised with sugar and long baking, so you can't taste their peel either. You may also need to scrub the dirt out of any nooks and crannies if your homegrown carrot has not grown long and straight and anonymous, with no personality whatsoever.

Plant you carrots now, or in the next week or so, or they won't get big roots by winter. If they haven't got to full growth them, they're never going to - come spring they will become stringy, with a hard core, then bolt to seed. Carrots gone to seed are quite lovely, with umbrellas of white flowers that hoverflies adore, and you'll end up with a lot of carrots seed for next summer, but if you have grown a hybrid, they won't come true to type. On the other hand, your hybrid carrot's parents were probably both excellent carrots in their own way, and you will end up with something that tastes good, even if it wasn't what you expected.

And, hopefully, it won't be rude at all.

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