Thinning your Seedlings – a neccessary evil

This is the job that I always hate.  Like you, I get quite attached to my little plants too.  Especially having watched excitedly as they transformed from little seeds into green seedlings, poking through soil.  But now the shadow of the grim reaper looms large for some of those poor innocent seedlings. 

Once your seedlings are about 2 inches tall and have more than 2 leaves, you’ll have to thin them out by removing the weakest (smallest) plants.  Sounds cruel (on second thoughts it not only sounds cruel, it is cruel!!), but if you don’t do this your plants will compete with each other for food & light and you will end up with poor quality vegetables.  For best results you need to have just the following number of plants in each spot.

• Lettuce, Rocket, Radish, Parsley - just one plant per spot.
• Beetroot - 4 plants per spot.
• Spring Onion – no need to thin

You’ll need a pair of scissors.  Simply select the plant you want to keep (usualy the biggest), and snip the other competing plant next to it just above the soil level.  The video shows you how to do this.

Alternatively you could transplant your unwanted seedlings into another pot or raised bed.  Here’s how to transplant.  You need to be careful not to distrurb your seedlings too much and don’t forget to water your plants in immediately after transplanting.

Don’t dump the plants that you have just removed.  The lettuce, rocket, radish, beetroot and parsley plants are all edible, just give them a quick wash.  They mightn’t fill you up but they do taste delicious and will give you a taster of what’s to come!

Planting Seeds in your Raised Bed

 

Each vegetable grows a certain number of plants per square.  This will be 1 per square, 3 per square, 9 per square or 16 per square.

1)      Use the planting pattern table (page 6) to see how many holes you need to make and how many seeds to sow in each hole.  For example if you are sowing carrots you need to make 16 holes in a square pattern and sow 4 seeds in each hole (64 seeds in total)

2)      Use your finger to make small hole(s) 13mm deep (half the length of your finger tip) in the compost.

3)      Pour some seeds into the palm of your hand.

4)      Use your thumb and index finger to drop the number of seeds into the hole.

5)      Use your finger to rake compost back into the hole and cover the seeds.

Chard stressed in heat

Rainbow chard is not very tolerant of heat, especially if its roots dry out a little.  The recent hot and dry spell may cause your rainbow chard to bolt and flower instead of producing lots of leaves.  If you see a stem developing then you need to cut it back to about 3 cm above the ground.  You can use the leaves in much the same way as you would use spinach leaves. See the video for full instructions.