9 Crops You Should ONLY Direct Sow (And Why)

there is nothing like the smell of fresh Chimay and there's also nothing like understanding how to plant in the garden I've made my fair share of mistakes trying to transplant everything under the sun and let's just say some of it hasn't gone that well so in this video jacqu and I are going to give you nine crops that these days we always direct sew the first plant we're going to be talking about today is a Summer Classic it is something we all look forward to every single year and it comes in a couple different varieties whether it's sweet Flint or dent and that is corn the cool thing about this plant is that it could be used in many different ways sweet corn can be eaten fresh could be cooked and then eaten right off the cob and of course you can make tortilla and popcorn out of the other varieties so it's a very cool plant to have in your garden now you can technically transplant this plant it's totally fine but the problem that you run into when you transplant corn is that it can often times blow over when it actually gets broken off and planted directly in the ground you get a much better root develop system the corn is not going to blow over and it's just generally going to be producing better for you at least that's been my experience when I have transplanted corn in the past ended up having to tie it up and support it cuz it actually blew over in the wind now the other thing I quickly want to mention here about corn is if you look at a spot like this this is roughly a 4X 8T section in my garden this is ideal for planting corn you don't want to plant corn in a straight line or in a skinny bed because it needs wind to pollinate so by planting it in a nice chunky block like this and directly going into the ground you're going to have have a stable plant that doesn't blow over in the wind you're going to have great pollination because you have them nice and close together in a grid and you're going to get an absolutely delicious Harvest of corn this variety here is martian jewels and I am going to be growing it this year because it can be eaten sweet or it could be saved and processed to be used in other methods so corn you can technically transplant it but we would always recommend direct sewing so you get a nice sturdy plant there is a plant that I absolutely love so much so that not only have I grown one as big as a manhole I have also eaten the entire head of one and yes of course I am talking about the one right next to me which would be the sunflower so the reason that I like to direct sew these bad boys is because first of all after you plant one and let it grow out and maybe you don't Harvest it for a cut flow and you let the birds eat it and they kind of spread the seeds around it's just going to drao itself to be honest with you a lot of the ones that are growing around my garden this season I did not even plant but the thing with sunflowers is that it doesn't like transplanting in a very specific way because there's a very sensitive tap fruit on sunflowers that when transplanted tends to result in a shorter sunflower even if it's the exact same variety so if you take a look at this one here this is the mammoth sunflower which as the name implies gets very very tall if I was to transplant this versus direct sew it the direct sewn one 99 times out of 100 would actually be a taller plant so if you want a vigorous and full sunflower which we all do I really recommend direct sewing it if you're very very sad about how long it might take to germinate there's two things you can do one would be to soak in water overnight then plant or the second I've shown you this tip a few times is to just snip the very very end of the sunflower seed just a tiny little bit allows that water to get in there when you plant it directly in the ground when it comes to snacking in the garden I have a very clear winner and it actually comes in many different forms much like the corn and I am talking today about peas now the cool thing about peas is that there's snow peas there's snap peas there's shelling peas which in my opinion is the most underrated of all the the peas but today we're going to be planting some sugar snap peas now the cool thing about peas is that they don't get very big and you could plant them very densely the reason why you generally don't want to transplant them is because they have very weak Roots a lot of people have actually even done something called The Gutter transplant method where you actually get a rain gutter fill it with a little bit of soil fill it with peas and then you kind of just slide the entire plant of peas into the ground so you don't mess with the roots at all but even easier you can just direct sew them and skip that whole process so what I like to do is find a section of my garden that has a fence like this hardware cloth fence right here I'll take a tool like this Cobra head and it's very simple all you have to do is take that dig yourself a nice pretty healthy Furrow here right along the fence that you're going to be putting them in and then simply take your piece whichever one you're growing if you haven't tried growing shelling Peas I highly encourage you guys to try it they're literally like candy none of them even make it into my house cuz we eat them all off the plant directly now when it comes to Growing peas if you have had trouble in the past getting them to actually germinate what you you can do is soak them overnight in a cup of water and then they'll be much more likely to germ now the soil as you could see is quite dark cuz we've been getting a lot of rains here so all I'm going to do is drop the peas in I'm not going to worry about spacing at all you could literally put these like an inch apart and they'll do just fine I'm going to go with something like 2 in across the board here and simply fill in this fur so I'm going to go all the way down the line if you have a couple extra peas at the end just throw them in it's not a big deal they could be planted very tightly and then all I'm going to do is simply cover them up that's all you have to do when it comes to direct sewing peas they grow very easily very readily after that and they don't last for very long so the cool thing is is that once you get a couple Harvest and it starts to get hot the peas will come out and you'll have more space in your garden to plan out all those delicious summer vegetables many years ago in my small Urban front yard Garden where I had about 20 square ft of space I tried to transplant this next crop and it was a catastrophic failure and a waste of my time and my life Essence so these days I always direct so my carrots so carrots obviously a root crop you eat the tap root of the plant in fact I have a row of them right here that have been very profitable for me this year my Farmers Market begins today because I've got quite the bumper crop but when you grow carrots you really don't want to disturb this they like a nice sort of loose almost Sandy LOM type of soil so transplanting is just going to disturb that and cause you all sorts of problems so this is the way that I planted this row that I just harvested from I took a Trel much like this one and you draw a very simple Furrow in the ground nothing too crazy here and then grab your seed pack this variety is called rainbow the one I planted is called Danvers 126 if you want like a really classic variety the Danvers is the one to go with I give it a light crease and then I just tap my fingers here and let the carrots drop out ideally spacing them every couple inches but you're never going to get that right when you grow the carrots like this and then you cover that up just like that and then put something on top you can put like a board you can put some burlap you can put some cardboard on for a couple weeks that'll keep this nice and moist that's the biggest issue with carrots it takes about 10 to 14 days for them to start to sprout and if you don't keep them nice and moist during that time they'll die and you'll get this weird patchiness to the carrots that you don't want and so what'll happen at this point is they'll start to sprout up and you really want to thin them out to about one every 2 in or so in fact that's exactly what I did over here and you can see that I've got this really nice spacing between my carrots so that I've got this really beautiful carrot just like this and this and then here's one that I didn't thin out and take a look at that it was growing literally right next to this big one sandwiched between those two so carot just don't want to be transplanted don't try it and make your life easier with a couple of these directo tips and one more Pro tip you can actually store these in sand and they'll last up to 6 months outside of a refrigerator when it comes to trying to get some amount of protein growing in your garden it could be quite challenging cuz most vegetables just simply don't have that much but there is one plant and that is the humble bean beans come in many different flavors many different shapes and sizes and specifically they're either really bush beans or pole beans so today we're going to be talking about pole beans because I think a lot of people don't understand exactly how they grow when you do want to grow a pole bean it's very easy to direct seed them because you could put them right up on the trellis that you're going to grow them on or actually you could even plant them alongside your corn to set up a Three Sisters Garden which is really quite a lot of fun now the thing that I wanted to mention about beans is that if you take a look at this one right here this is a established pole bean what happens is that it wraps around the structure that it's growing on now the way that it wraps is actually by wrapping if you're looking right at the structure to the right so you can see here it's twisting behind around the pole that is how it's always going to wrap around any structure you set it up on the main thing I wanted to call out though is that if you are planting beans on a trellis you don't want to plant it somewhere where it doesn't have a vertical section to climb so this trellis has these horizontal gaps if I were to put the bean straight down the middle it couldn't climb up that cuz it doesn't have tendrils the way it climbs is it physically wraps around the structure and that is how it's held in place so make sure you have a nice vertical structure for the beans to climb on other than that all you have to really do is take your beans come down to the base so right here I have a nice vertical line I'm going to take my bean and just put it simply at the base under the ground right there now the other thing I want to mention is that while while you can of course transplant beans me and Kevin ran an experiment last year where we did one section of the garden where we transplanted beans and then we immediately at the same time direct sewed the exact same varieties next to them what happened was that the transplanted beans actually stagnated for a little bit and by the time they started growing the direct seed ones actually caught up and surpass the transplanted beans so there's nothing to say you can't do either one but if you have the space ready for it it's always better to just directo your beans they're always going to catch up to those ones that were transplants I think I have a new nickname and I'm giving it to myself and it would be the flower father because this year is by far the year I've grown the most flowers and wild flowers so in this particular area I have this kind of smiling look to this border planting where there's only wild flowers some sunflowers but a bunch of other stuff as well and then my vegetable garden that's growing in ground is kind of behind it so I'm bringing a lot of Life a lot of color a lot of beauty a lot of insect and Bug activity to this area which of course is going to benefit my vegetable garden but I do that by direct sewing and not transplanting so a pollinator mix or a wildflower mix to me there's no point in trying to transplant it when you can just take a pack like this clear out a bed and just do a little bit of that remember that guy Salt Bay dropping salt on the steak I think he got canceled or something but either way you can just do this cover it up water it in and this is what will result and it is such a rewarding thing I don't know why it took me so many years to figure this out some plants are just simply not worth transplanting and that's because they grow so fast that by the time you grow it as a transplant you might as well have just put it in the ground cuz it's going to be ready in just a few weeks in this case I am talking about the radish now I have a LoveHate relationship with radishes they're not something where I'm ever like oh man I wish I had a radish right now it would be so delicious but I am starting to respect them ever since somebody told me that you should eat your radish with a little bit of salt Maybe even try baking it and tastes like a potato definitely not a potato but it did taste better so I am trying to grow a little bit more radishes so I can experience them a little bit better they are good on salads I guess and I do like them pickled so what I'm going to do here just take a nice little handful of radish seeds the cool thing about Rish seeds is that they're actually really big for such a fast growing plant I don't know why that surprises me but I'm going to Simply lay down a Sprinkle right on the surface here right along my drip lines and the thing is is like the French breakfast radish which is what I'm sewing right here it's ready in something like 28 days so why would you bother transplanting it when you could just put it straight in your garden and get ready to harvest it in just a matter of a few weeks all we're going to do is place that down so I've placed all my seed and now I have some extra all I'm going to do is do that just let them sprinkle wherever they grow they're going to be ready so fast I don't care whatsoever if they take up any space so all I'm going to do for the seeds that I intentionally planted is simply press them into the soil lightly bury them like I said in just about a month I'm going to be harvesting radishes straight out of this bed and then I just have to figure out out how to eat them this next one is a Summer Classic one that I've grown a few seasons in a row now to great success and also extreme satisfaction whether you're eating it straight out of the field or you're going to chill it maybe put it into a smoothie of course I'm talking about a watermelon and this also would apply to any melon that you are growing because you plant them in a very specific way and they don't really like to be disturbed once they're planted so roots that don't want to be disturbed you should probably direct so right put it right in the place that it's going to be until it gets harvested and the way to do that is the following so take a Trel of some kind you can make a mount either by doing what I'm about to do by healing some up yourself or just taking some soil from another area and dropping it right here but I'm just going to pull a bit of soil together here plant it on a mound and you want to plant this out H maybe soil temperatures need to be 70 to 90ish degrees air temperature somewhere in that same range so I've got this nice Mound here and then what I do is I just punch the middle Just a Touch create a slight depression right here and I'll do two to four seeds per Mound this one's Crimson sweet great variety smallish seeds though and in we go 1 2 3 4 and then I'll steal a little bit of extra soil cover that up press that down you give this a nice water in and then if you were to plant even more watermelon you'd space these Mounds out about four to 6 feet apart so I could put one here and I could put one right over there and right up there because these guys sprawl like crazy so plants in general that don't like to be disturbed just put them where they're going to be and this technique works really really well the last pick for you guys today is maybe a little bit less conventional because classically most people always transplant this but I'm here to tell you that I am not going to be transplanting it anymore and that is actually the cucumber and I'll tell you exactly why when it comes to growing cucumbers they actually have very sensitive Roots so what tends to happen is you'll take your cucumber transplant put it in the garden and it'll just kind of sit there for a few days maybe even a week or two before it even starts growing meanwhile if you direct seed your cucumbers which I'm about to show you how to do right on this A-frame chalus then you don't have that problem by the time this catches up to that transplant it's going to far exceed it so here's the deal if you need to plan out your garden you need to figure out spacing and you don't have the time then go ahead and do your transplant but when you do do it very carefully and do not disturb the roots now if you want to avoid that altoe then I highly encourage that just direct seed them so what I'm going to be doing here is using this 2x4 ft in total uh distance on this trellis I'm going to be direct seeding it so that they're about a foot apart now I am going to be growing a pickling cucumber which I'm very excited for cuz this year I intend to grow many more pickles than I've ever grown before now when it comes to cucumber spacing if you're growing on a trellis like this you could get away with just a foot apart between each plant so what I'm going to do is take two seeds cuz when you're direct seeding you never know if they're actually going to come up or not or maybe one's going to get munched on by a pest so I'm going to come down here at the base right underneath one of these little legs here and take my two seeds put it in the ground press it into the soil just like that and then I'm going to come about a foot away so I'm going to just take another step in from the other side and put another two seeds right there the really cool thing about growing cucumbers on an A-frame trellis like this is that the plant will climb to the top and then you can start draping it over by that point the plant is now going to be 4 or 5 ft long it's going to be nearing the end of its lifespan you can just take some more cucumber seeds direct seed the other side and start a new succession of cucumbers by the time that one starts growing this one will be spent you could remove it let that plant climb over to the other side and just back and forth back and forth direct SE cucumbers on either side until your season is over now if you want to grow cucumbers and containers we have a great video for you guys right here to check out and that's it for this video good luck in the garden and keep on growing

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 223,767

Keywords: epic gardening

Id: a6XaZR0OfhY

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024