In a shocking turn of events, things have started growing at Farmer Weenie’s homestead. Panicking, she heads to the bible of gardening, Wikipedia, to find out what to do next. All that does is confuse the Weenie even more, so she reaches out to her secret weapon in the great white north.
Dear friend and fellow farmer Kirsten Bartel owns Seed and Bean Garden Design in Edmonton, Canada, where they have things like snow and health insurance. Hopes are high that she will put down her shovel or knitting or delicious pot of soup she’s cooking (overachiever much?) to answer this question…
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So, what’s the answer??? We planted radishes, too and they look like yours, but even more crowded. They only grew to like marble sized. Also, ask her how you know when to pull them out?
Love,
Another new farmer who is totally clueless and just buried stuff in the ground
Step one: Rad the seed packet for that variety of plant or check web for general thinning distance between plants.
Step two: find your biggest and strongest plants in the bunch and start there. Keep best and thin, say 2 inches around it or whatever. They need room to grow big and strong. This is why you plant in rows as well. Less thinning & more usable plants.
Eat sprouts or disgard. Radishes, peas, beets, lettuce all can be eaten in their entirety. Toss them in a salad after a quick rinse.
Your blog posts on gardening crack me up!
Sorry I’m not your Canadian friend but maybe I can give you a hand.
Thinning works this way. Just like people, plants need “personal space” to be happy. Just like people, your radishes don’t want other radishes sitting on their laps 24/7.
So yes, thinning means pulling some of the seedlings out so they have space (like your cabbages or whatever those larger plants are). Sadly, though, this means those seedlings aren’t going to be able to be replanted (among other things, pulling them yanks out delicate little roots). The good news is, that’s okay!
With radishes, they aren’t big plants, so they don’t need as much room as the other plants you have there. So you don’t have to go crazy with thinning them out. Yank some out, and let the rest go crazy.
And the best thing is, all gardening (even by the pros) requires a lot of trial and error. So try something, see how it works, and learn from it for the next time.
Hi Farmer Weenie,
The urban microfarm is looking great! Such a lush contrast to my own food-growing empire (ha!) that has succumbed to the ravages of the upcoming winter.
I’m so sorry to have abandoned you to the perils of farming in Texas but, from the look of your exuberantly growing radishes, you’re doing perfectly fine on your own.
Re: thinning. It’s a tricky thing – both an art and a science (as is much of growing things) – and people have different approaches. My approach is to avoid it as much as possible, mostly because I think it’s a waste of time and seed. When I can, I start my plants in pots and then transplant them into the soil, which means I plant only the amount of plants I need and want. In the case of root vegetables, like carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, etc., they need to be ‘direct sowed’ so thinning is inevitable. However, in that case, when I have fresh seed (seed I just recently bought), I sow the seeds lightly (no, I can’t tell you what ‘lightly’ means – that’s the art of it) – that way, I don’t have to thin as much and waste so much seed. If the seed is a few years old, I sow a little thicker because most seeds lose germination potential over time. When time comes to thin, rather than pulling the seedling out, I cut it with little scissors for two reasons: 1.) When seedlings are really close together, it’s hard to pull out just a couple because the roots are tangled around each other and you can end up pulling out more than you want, and 2.) I like to throw the thinnings into a salad, onto a sandwich, or as a garnish on soup (so they don’t go to waste), and prepping the thinnings is easier when they don’t have roots to mess with.
Specifically for thinning your radishes (and I feel I’m being a bit long-winded here), thin them to a 1/2″ to 1″. Radishes can handle a little crowding and I find, at least with the little cherry types, that they’re best when small anyway, about the size of a large marble. And Felicia, when it comes to harvesting, when you can see about 1/4″-1/2″ width (not depth)of the root (called the shoulders) above the soil, they’re ready to harvest – but that rule only applies if you haven’t planted too deep or too shallow (Jackie’s right – you have to develop a feel for it through trial and error).
This is a great question! I realized that when I wrote my post about growing radishes http://www.seedandbean.com/blog/?p=762 that I neglected to talk about thinning so this would be a good idea for a post of my own.
Hope this helps.
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