- Our patch is pumping with a ton of recently sowed crops
growing like crazy. It seems like every
seed I sowed has made it and that's making the garden
beds a little crowded, but that's a good problem to have, A, because I love thinning out. I wish I could thin myself out a bit, but I'm working on that, and B, the side effect to thinning out is you have to buy new clothes. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. No, the side effect to thinning out is the delicious baby greens that you can harvest for the table. Good day, I'm Mark from
Self Sufficient Me, and in this video, I'm gonna give you my five top tips on how to
thin a ton of vegetables. Let's get into it. (gentle music) Number one, identify what
needs to be thinned out. Nature doesn't always do a
great job at sowing her seeds. Often she will just plunk them all down in one spot and they'll grow in a clump, leaving the strongest to
try to dominate to survive. And other times, certain
plants will grow happily in a bunch together and not worry too much and almost grow at the same rate, Even though they're very close. This is two top-notch examples, all practically in the same spot. You've got the peas here that
I actually sowed with spacing about two inches apart, hoping that they would all come up and if they didn't all come up, I knew that they were still fairly close. That if some of them didn't make it, the gaps would still be covered anyway, as the peas grew. On the other hand, if
they did all come up, which happened, they still would be at the right spacing to
not get too cluttered. Then on this side,
you've got the beetroot, which I just sewed willy, nilly, knowing full well that I could over-sow. And then thin out later,
as all these plants grew, if they were too close
together in some places. Here's an interesting fact about beetroot that demonstrates nature's
own way of oversowing. When you sow a beetroot seed,
unlike many other plants, it looks like the one seed,
but it grows several plants. And what happens is, if
all those plants germinate, they will grow out from
each other just slightly, to give each other a little
bit of growing space. So that's beetroot's natural way of trying to strengthen its odds. And that interests me because
we've always been told and we still are, that we
should plant our veggies at a certain distance apart. When I very rarely do that these days, I will over sow most of my veg, then just thin them out as needed. If I left this cluster grow, which is all from the one
seed, they will grow okay. Yes, of course they will develop a bigger bulb if you've spaced them out about 25 centimeters or six inches or so, but I reckon this is better
because you're thinning out baby beetroots and greens as you go. And then you're leaving that
last in to grow the big bulbs for preserving later or
eating nice large ones. Larger fruiting plants might
be a little bit different because you can't really
thin some of them out to eat right away. I'm thinking plants like tomatoes. I grew tomatoes in here last
season in this same row. And I sowed a heap of seed, hoping that at least one
or two would come up. I ended up getting a whole bunch coming up in just about everywhere I sewed it, but you just can't eat tomato plants because they're poisonous. Nevertheless, you can't let them grow in a big cluster either. For plants like that, say tomatoes, capsicums, maybe artichokes and all that, you're better off physically
thinning them out early, once they're nice and strong, choosing the strongest seedlings to remain in position or transplanting them. And I'll get to transplanting later on. But thinning those types of crops out are more beneficial because you want those larger plants to say, be at 20 or 40 centimeter spacing or a foot apart, so that they can grow uncontested and then become productive
when they start to fruit, which is the main objective, isn't it? To eat the fruits of those plants rather than the plant itself. So that's the difference. Number two, use two hands. This is more of a technique
thing than anything else. But what I mean by using two hands is when you're going
to thin out seedlings, they are very small and delicate. And if you've got a lot
that's close together because that's why
we're thinning them out, you're going to get
some collateral damage. If you just pull it out
with one hand willy, nilly, 'cause I wanna thin these fellows out. This is lemon coriander by the way, an absolute cracker of
a coriander variety. But you can see that al my
seeds have come up again. So I'm thinking them out. Luckily, you can eat the whole plant. But what I don't wanna do
is pull out more than I want or damage the root structure and the plants that are
left behind to grow. So let me bring you in closer
and I'll give you a demo. You'll see here, I've got two
plants really close together. This one's on the outside and it can grow up here
and use that space. This one is on the inside and
it's just going to crowd in. So I wanna remove this seedling here. So what I do is I get hold
of the base of that seedling. And then I hold the other one
down and the soil around it, so that when I pull, limited soil disturbance
comes out with it, pat that down a bit, and then you're left with
that undisturbed space. Now if you disturb it a bit too much, and you've pulled out
a little bit more soil than you wanted, and you know
you've disturbed the roots, don't fret over it, just get
the hose and water it back in, settle that soil back down
around the roots of the plant. And that should be okay. Number three, remove
larger, edible root crops first when you're filling them out. That's counterintuitive to what
I was talking about before. I know, so don't get
confused with say plants that aren't edible, like tomatoes, where you might wanna leave the strongest and largest one grow on,
or say a cucumber bush. You might leave the
strongest one in that cluster and remove some of the small ones so that that can grow
up and produce fruit, because it's the strongest. And the strongest often
develop into the best plants. But these edible crops, you
wanna get the largest ones because you wanna eat them. And even though they're small and baby, you still want a big baby,
everyone loves a big baby. I was a huge baby when I was little. Too big, mom fed me well. Then I turned into a big guy. So, you know, grew strong. Anyway, I'm digressing. You wanna harvest the largest ones, leave space for the other
ones to then develop that have more space, so that you've got that continuity of eating from your garden, right from a few weeks after sowing. So let's hunt for another larger carrot and I'll bring you in close
and show you what I mean. I just dig down a little bit
without disturbing it too much and just have a look at the sizes. So those two are fairly
good size for babies. The one at the front
here is a little larger, even though that one has a bigger stem. So I'm gonna choose this one here and then we'll let this
other one behind grow on. So I'll hold that down, pull. And here we go. Cover that back over, let that grow on. And then there's that gap there for it to grow even bigger out. And that's one of the cutest French baby carrots I've ever seen. But here, you can see this
Australian yellow leaf lettuce. It hasn't been thinned out at all. And there's a reason for that. We're thinning it out
through the leaves only, picking the biggest leaves, cracking them off and
having them in salads. It's an edible green
hedge, a hedge of lettuce. Number four is give a little
extra water and nutrients. When you're growing crops like this, and here we've got daikon radish, and behind them, a bunch
of Japanese white turnips. And when you're growing
them in a cluster like this, they do need a little
bit of extra moisture and sometimes some extra nutrients, depending on how well
you see them growing. In this case, I haven't had to add any extra nutrients or give
them a liquid fertilizer feed, which is the easiest way to do it when they're clustered up like this, rather than trying to
sprinkle around the root zone of a granulated type of fertilizer or using your own chicken manure, you could burn young plants. If you've prepared your beds well, you shouldn't need to be adding
too much extra fertilizer for the first few weeks
anyway, or at least a month. Number five is eat or transplant. And what I mean by that
is some crops do well to thin out and then transplant
into another location. If you wanna increase your
crops and spread them out, another garden bed that you've got spare and other crops, when you thin them out, they don't transplant very well at all. And they're best off actually
eaten as small babies, rather than bothering with trying to grow them in another spot. And here's another really good example, between the beetroot and the
peas here, we've got celeriac. Celeriac is like celery. You can eat the leaves
and the stems like celery, but it develops a nice
big, fat bulb of a root that can be shaved into salads and put in soups and
eaten like a root crop. But here, I've thinned them out. You can see they're spaced out nicely for that plant to grow nice and big, develop a nice big bulb. And I've thinned them out from over there where I was showing
you the carrots before. For a root crop, this does
transplant quite well, especially when the young,
but other root crops don't transplant very well at all. Beetroot is one of them. You can get away with it
if you're very careful and get them young, if
you leave them too long, like say at this height,
you're best off leaving them develop as baby beets,
in situ and eat them. Because if you try to
transplant them at this size, you can do it, but if you
tried nine times out of 10, that will suffer quite
a bit and may not grow very well in a new location. This is another good example, carrots are particularly terrible at regrowing in another spot. If I was to pull this now, and even if I did take some measures, like taking the top off
so that you didn't get too much evaporation lost and thus, less stress when you planted it out, this carrot would not
transplant well at all in a new location. And honestly, it's not worth it. You're better off just harvesting this. You can eat the tops by the way, and using this as a baby green in salads or a little stir fry
or something like that, rather than trying to plant
it back into the garden. Salad crops like lettuce,
transplant very well too. If I just get this
fella out nice and easy. Don't disturb the onion here. I can transplant this, even
though it's a reasonable size and I didn't get a lot of root bulb. As long as I give it enough water, perhaps a bit of a water in with a little bit of seaweed fertilizer. As I transplant it, I
could put it anywhere and it should grow quite well. All those plants there in that garden bed, especially all the lettuce,
has been transplanted from a reasonable size
seedling into that bed there. And you can see just how
well it's flourishing. Here they are. I'm not gonna waste any of these examples that I showed you today. We're gonna be eating all of this. I've just put it in some water. These crops, how beautiful. All the baby, thinned out
seedlings ready to munch on. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure you
thin those fingers out and give me a big fat thumbs up. Thanks a lot for watching, bye for now.
