Planting Tips

 

Not only have the lettuces survived, they are thriving.  In the foreground, the Yugoslavian Red Butterhead lettuce is beginning to crowd.

 

Happily, there was only one casualty, a little Red Romaine, of the windstorm.  Though a few others have not yet fully recovered, it  does appear that they will survive.  Some of the lettuces, indeed, are doing extremely well. The Yugoslavian Red Butterhead lettuces are beginning to crowd one another.  All the lettuces are actually planted at half-distance, and because of this, they will crowd each other as they grow.  Once the young lettuces begin to overcrowd, I will harvest every other plant, leaving the rest to grow to maturity.  This way, I get nearly twice the yield out of the space.  If you're still wondering what I mean when I say "half-distance," let me explain.  Each seed package will give you two distances: plant spacing and row width.  Now, when you're growing in a raised bed, as I am, you need not concern yourself with row spacing, as long as you are able to reach to the center of your bed from each side.  Row spacing measurements are there to ensure that the gardener has room to maneuver in the rows between the plants, which is something a raised bed gardener does not need to do.  In fact, when constructing your raised bed, you need to ensure that you are able to reach to the center to avoid having to step into the beds at all.  This will help you avoid soil compaction. Now, when you discard the row spacing measurement, you are left only with plant spacing.  In my lettuce bed, I did plant rows, but the rows are spaced only the plant spacing distance apart (for this bed, 10 inches).  In the rows, I spaced each plant 5 inches apart.  When I remove every other immature plant, that will leave all of my plants spaced at 10 inch intervals, creating a 10 inch grid over the entire bed.  I could also have spaced the rows 5 inches apart, and just removed more plants when they got crowded, but I chose this method, for simplicity's sake (and because I was short on time when I did the planting).  After you've figured out the spacing for your plants, there are two ways that you can go about planting your rows.  After you measure the distance and know where your rows are going to be, you can either sow an entire row of seeds and later thin them to the 5 inch intervals, or you can measure the 5 inch intervals at the time of planting and drop a few seeds at each location.  The second method is how I planted this garden.  The reason I use this technique is to conserve seeds.  If you sow an entire row of seeds, that's a lot of little seedlings that you have to thin out and throw away. I prefer to only have to pull out a couple extras at each location.  Plus, if you planted this way, your plants are already properly spaced!

 

Note:   In a raised bed, it is possible to crowd your plants a little, to get maximum yield from your plot, but you still need to allow the plants sufficient room to grow, or you will end up with stunted, unproductive plants. So, feel free to shorten the distance slightly, if you are going to be providing ample nutrients, but don't overdo it.

 

 

The radishes are also coming along quite well.  Grow, little radishes, grow!