What is wrong with my carrots?

I will admit I am a novice gardener, with this being only the third year I have truly tried to grow anything to eat in my garden. I have had successes and then I have had major failures. In fact I no longer try to grow tomatoes or peppers because I get nothing despite spending a small fortune on the right soil, fertilizer and so on. I am told tomatoes are easy to grow but that hasn't proven to be the case for me. So this year I didn't even plant them:)

For the second year in a row I have attempted to grow carrots. Last year my carrots were a tangled mess.



All the carrots were intertwined, small and rather strange looking:)










We got a great crop but really there was not much you could do with them because of the carrots size and the way they grew intertwined together:( Most went to the horse my daughter rides for lessons. I think I was able to get a few carrots to make a stir fry:)

(Last Year's carrot crop)


So after getting lots of advice on what we did wrong. We bought the correct soil, carefully separated the sprouts making sure we only had one carrot planted in each hole. Watched out for the so called carrot fly. Added calcium to the soil and really watch our watering. So this week we harvested our carrots and the results are not much better:(.


These are this years carrots. Smaller crop and the carrots are still small and weird looking. But none were intertwined, YAY:) Once again we had enough to add to dinner's stir fry but that was it. So I am thinking of adding carrot to my list of vegetables I can't grow, along with pepper and tomatoes:(. Unless out there someone knows what I am doing wrong and kindly passes on the information to me!

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