As a general rule, carrots are the easiest vegetable to grow in the home garden and the hardest to mess up – as long as you take a few specific steps at the beginning of the spring planting season.

I like to think of carrots as the lazy gardener’s best friend. If you plant carrots right, you will have a huge margin for error until you get around to digging them up.

At the top of the list of carrot attributes is fairly easy germination, although carrot seed poses a minor challenge because it is so small. A lot of gardeners use one of those syringelike seed dispensers to set the seeds in the soil. Otherwise, you’ll undoubtedly overseed and have to do a lot of thinning after the seeds sprout.

The best approach to carrot planting is to prepare the area where the carrots will be planted, tilling as deep as the tiller will go. Then use a garden fork (sometimes called a potato fork) or spade to lift 3 or 4 inches of the clay or compacted soil that’s right below the tilled soil. Then till again to combine.

If you haven’t dug a deep hole in your garden lately, you may be surprised at how close to the surface the hard stuff starts, and for carrots, which grow straight down, this can create obstacles. It is not unusual to harvest crooked carrots from a Kansas garden.

The best tip on carrot planting that I have read came from Joseph Thomasson’s “Growing Vegetables in the Great Plains,” which remains the definitive guide for this region. After the soil is appropriately tilled, draw a small furrow of just an inch or so where the row will be planted. Wet the furrow lightly and let any standing water seep into the soil. Place seeds along the furrow an inch apart, with the expectation that you’ll thin to have a row in which the carrots are 3 to 4 inches apart. Cover the seeds lightly with soil.

Now cover the row with kitchen plastic wrap. Secure one end of the plastic with bricks and pull the film down the row, anchoring it at the other end. For obvious reasons, this should not be attempted on a windy day. Once both ends are secure, place additional bricks along both sides of the row of plastic.

The plastic does a couple of things. It creates a greenhouse effect that warms the soil and speeds germination. It also keeps the soil moist, which also helps germination. Importantly, the continual moistness of the soil means you don’t have to water. This is significant because it is almost impossible to water carrot seed, which is so small and planted so close to the surface of the soil, without washing out the row.

The worst-case scenario is that a spring deluge will come along before the seeds germinate and set them adrift. When that happens, the carrot seeds will either collect in pools or flow through the garden in rivulets. In either case, the result will be carrots sprouting in many locations in the garden, and none of them in the row in which they were planted. Bummer.

The plastic film speeds germination enough that your chances of having this happen are reduced. But don’t plant when rain is in the forecast.

Keep replanting every couple of weeks through spring and then start again in fall for a winter crop.

With Kansas garden soil often being sturdy to a fault, the best varieties for planting here include Danvers Half Long and Chantenay, which have a pointed end but are broader at the shoulder and shorter than the long, slender grocery story carrots, making them better able to penetrate hard soil.

Another nice thing about growing carrots is that you really don’t have to worry about bugs and worms bothering them. And because they are underground, the spring winds won’t harm them.

Carrots continue to develop flavor as they grow, and you can pretty much choose your harvest time. If you left most varieties in the ground indefinitely, the carrots eventually would die and rot, but you don’t have to worry about the vegetable overripening if you put off the harvest until next Tuesday. This may be the carrot’s most endearing quality of all.