I TRANSPLANTED My Carrots... Here's What Happened!

alrighty folks so in just a minute we are going to have new and more experiment results and this one in particular is one that i've been really really looking forward to over the course of the last several months and so what we're going to kind of get some insight on today is whether or not you can transplant carrots beets and rooted crops into your garden and the school of thought on this is that maybe you don't want to do that because some of them have a tap root that's going to grow down really fast and therefore if you were to transplant it it's going to end up as a bit of like a wonky vegetable however i would really like to be able to transplant them into the garden because that's then going to allow me to extend the gardening season as i can start them in seed cells and then transplant them in when they're all set so to figure out whether or not it is possible to do so i designed a little experiment and so on april 2nd i started a set of carrot seeds and a set of beet seeds and the one critical piece of information on this front is that i started all of these in seed cells so i used our worm casting seedling mix and i utilized three inch pots for this for them to begin germinating and growing in and then over the course of the first three weeks i just allowed them to grow in that seed cell until we got to day 21 and on day 21 that is when i transplanted them into this bed right in front of me here and by this time the top root on the carrots had already reached the bottom of the seed cell so today i'm a little bit nervous in terms of what we're going to see when we harvest those carrots out of the beds now also on that exact same day that i transplanted these into the beds i started another set of carrot seeds and beet seeds and for these ones i direct sow these started them directly in the garden bed so no transplanting with this second set so why did i start another set of seeds 21 days later well what i'm looking to simulate with this is essentially my garlic harvest and my succession crop and so if i end up direct sowing into that bed well then i can't start those seeds until i've harvested the garlic and so now what this is also going to show us is how big of a difference that 21 days between start dates had on how the plants grew so once they were both in this bed the only things that i did from a plant care perspective is that i thinned them down to nine plants per square foot and then i fed the soil one tablespoon of our 444 superfood per square foot and other than that these babies have been getting the exact same watering and just growing over the last several months so as mentioned today is now july 26th and what we're going to do next is harvest all of these out weigh them and then make some observations on it but just before we do that if you're enjoying this video and if you want to see more gardening experiments then i encourage you to subscribe to our channel here put out new videos every single week to take as much of the guesswork out of gardening for you as possible now with that said let's dive in and i want to get started with the beats all righty and we're going to get started with our beats that were direct sewn and based on what i'm seeing i think this is going to be a fairly underwhelming harvest yup man oh these are not doing so well look at that brutal oh looky here that's closer closer to an actual beat and so that was completely pathetic what we just got there i do have a couple of ideas as to why that is the case but first let's get the rest of these beets harvested and then onto the carrots and so these are the beets that we transplanted into the garden and you might notice that i have them in sets of three that is something that you can do with beets which we'll chat about more on a later video those ones are pretty tiny there there we go now we're starting to get something a couple decent ones here a couple more over here all right we're gonna weigh those in just a second if they even register on the scale but now i want to harvest these carrots this is the main event i'm a little bit more optimistic about what we got going on here so let's get started with the ones that we direct sewed into the bed all righty let's see what we got harvesting carrots is one of the most fun things you never know what's beneath the surface there a little bit of growth on these a little bit more size there hey a little bit there pretty tiny as well though oh there's a decent lawn another decent one another decent one all right here we go hey and so that actually wasn't so bad those last ones that we harvested there were really really nice and so let's now wrap up the harvesting portion of this video by doing the ones that we transplanted all right this one obviously has some size on it at the top let's see what we got here oh look at that so wonky cool next up that's a pretty nice one good size on those number three pretty straight these ones have a little bit more character them i would say continue along definitely more size a little bit of wonk on that one a couple more here at the end not so bad all righty let's get started on the weighing first ones we're going to do are the beats that were direct sewn which was our very underwhelming crop a haul for the ages all right gonna zero out the scale whopping 39 grams all right next up are the transplanted beets that's that's a beat there that's for sure okay that's zeroed out let's get these on there now 226 grams that's a bit better already now onto our carrots and these are the ones that we direct sowed got that zeroed out away on them 110 grams and last but not least the carrots that we transplanted we're looking pretty good here and there's definitely a little more size on these than the ones that we direct sewed definitely a little bit more character as well on to the scale we go zeroed out moment of truth can't get them all in there 300 grams that's not so bad all right so let's get into a couple of observations here and the first one is that this is absolutely not the harvest that i was hoping for i wanted way more than this but i'm kind of chuckling to myself here because a couple of years ago i would not have even shared this video i would have been too self-conscious i wouldn't have put it out there because i would have kind of felt like i need to come across a certain way that i know how to grow all these things perfectly under all the conditions but i think at this point i'm just plump out of you know what's to give and so this is the fact of the matter with gardening is that this happens from time to time and so why did these not grow as well as i hoped well what i've realized and what's been a really big learning for me this season is that when i look at say this crop here as well as my potatoes my cabbages my broccoli they are all really really small this year and ultimately what ended up happening is that we had a really really cold spring and that was kind of compounded by the fact that i started things really early outside in the garden and so what i've learned through this is that plants like they literally have a number of growing days and by me starting early plus it being a cold spring is that i indexed a very significant number of those growing days against ultimately very cold days but then when i look at some of the other crops in my garden such as the potatoes and the carrots that i started in our soil bed experiment and those are much later in the year the vast majority of those vegetables growing days are indexed against days that are much warmer much sunnier and as a result they're growing much better so i'm going to be really curious to see how those ones do in those beds and do a bit of a comparison to these crops that were much earlier on in the season to see how big of an impact that has so even when it did not end up as the bounty or the harvest or the yield that i was hoping for still got some really good kind of unexpected learnings for myself now what about the transplanting piece well from like a sheer volume perspective i know without a doubt that those we transplanted did way better and so what that tells me is that those extra 21 days that we're able to gain by starting things in seed sales while the garlic or another crop finishes in the garden they make a huge impact a huge difference on that succession crop that we get in there and so that kind of leads into the third piece in terms of what am i going to do moving forward and so for the beets i am absolutely going to be starting those in seed cells and transplanting them into the garden beds when space becomes available the structure on them is beautiful and they're just way larger in size now for the carrots the ones that we transplanted they definitely are a little bit wonky they're not quite as straight and picturesque as the ones that we direct sowed into the garden but the word that kept on coming back to me as i was harvesting them was character they just had a little bit more character to them and to be honest i kind of was like connecting with them they really like spoke to me and maybe it's because like i think they look like a little bit of misfits and i feel like a little bit of a misfit and they've got a little bit more character and i've got a little bit more character but anyways all that to say is that i like the fact that they have a little bit more character to them and so because of that and because of the fact that it yielded way more by having those extra 21 days i'm also going to be starting my carrots in containers and then transplanting them after about 21 days and so the final observation and takeaway here is simply to run experiments in your garden i think this is an absolutely fantastic way to tap into the mental health benefits of gardening because it removes all the expectation around bounty harvest and yield and it puts all of your energy onto the things that are within your control and that ultimately yields a lot of learnings for you which is only going to improve your gardening practice but i think on top of that because we've let go of that expectation on bounty harvest yield we actually end up falling deeper in love with our gardening practice so i suspect that'll be the case for you as well but folks that's everything i wanted to cover off on for today let me know what you think down in the comments here if there's any experiments that you'd like to see us run let me know down there as well other than that can't wait to catch you on the next one go get your hands dirty and i'll see you soon

Channel: Restorative Gardening with Mind & Soil

Views: 19,344

Keywords: mind and soil, mind & soil, mind and soil gardening, mind and soil carrots, growing carrots, how to grow carrots, transplanting carrots, transplanting carrots! can you do it?, transplanting carrots seedlings plant, how to thin carrots, can you transplant carrots, can you replant carrots, how to transplant carrots, carrots

Id: GTHB8_j3Rcs

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022