Oh! Good point! I could turn them into biochar! You’re smart, Lauren.
As for seedbeds, I imagine that will work. David the Good did a video about that a year or so ago, so it seems to work well for him.
My one concern with the seedbed approach is that transplanting at all may break the taproot of any species that has a nice taproot, and that’s a trait I’d like to encourage in all my plants because I have a dry climate.
Not wanting to leave irregular gaps that might skew the selection process is an excellent point. My plan is to plug any gap with a seed of a species that’s an appropriate size for the gap and is easy to germinate – bonus points if it’s a representative of a plant family that isn’t in that garden bed already.
Malcolm, thank you for your suggestion. That solves some problems for me. I end up watering the weeds while germinating my seeds and end up with strong plants in some places and weak ones other places. In the past I’ve found squash or okra seedlings that germinated outside of their areas and just moved them with a shovel. They grew up just fine.
It has descriptions and pictures of the roots of vegetable plants at different growth stages, and it talks about the effects of transplanting vs direct seeding. I’ve only read a few sections, but with cabbages, when the tap root is destroyed, one root on the transplanted plant takes over from it and heads downward. Similarly with tomatoes.
Transplanting on those plants did seem to increase the number of branching lateral roots; that could be good or bad, depending on our goals.
In all cases, the roots of vegetable plants of all sorts, transplanted or direct sown, look far more extensive than I would have imagined them to be.
Oh, nice! If brassicas can grow a new taproot after the original gets broken, that makes transplanting them much less likely to have unwanted consequences. Maybe a seedbed approach would be a good idea for those, after all!
Yeah, I found out how deep vegetable roots can grow when I read Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts. They can easily be huge! The other day, I watched this video on YouTube that said something like, “Two feet of soil is all you’ll ever need for any of your garden plants,” and I kept shaking my head.
Maybe they’ll survive on that little soil, but I betcha anything that if your goal is either drought tolerance or plants that can grow with little to no fertilizer, you want your crops to have very deep roots.
Oh! By the way! I think selecting for drought tolerance definitely counts as a type of low-input landrace. Water is an input in an ecosystem where water doesn’t fall out of the sky during the main growing season. For anyone depending on the Colorado River for irrigation, it’s a precious, nonrenewable, ecologically unsustainable input.
I’ve read a bit more of the book, just flipping around and looking at the drawings of plant root systems. It seems like some plants easily reestablish “tap-roots” (or roots that provide the same function) and other plants don’t. And some plants don’t really have taproots in any case. He does mention the commonly known fact that cucumbers and squash are hard to transplant.
In a very arid climate, taproots might not actually be useful; in some places, the deeper soil layers are actually dryer than the upper layers. Any irrigation or rainfall stays in the top few feet. (This is also why such soils tend to get salted by irrigation over time.) I would guess that taproots are most helpful in borderline areas between wet and dry, where surface water routinely runs out but there is a deeper water table that stays consistently moist and can be tapped by deep-rooted plants.
Hmm! Well, that may describe my yard. I live in a desert, but I’m pretty close to the river that supplies water to my town. I’ve been told the water table in our neighborhood is too high for the houses to have basements. And most of our precipitation comes in winter, and our soil is pure sand and rocks, so it goes down through the soil fast. So there’s probably way more water in the deep soil than the top, in summer.
Revisiting the transplanting aspect of this—I recently direct seeded a bed of beets, and transplanted a bed of cabbages. The transplanting was much more enjoyable; I like being able to work with small seeds while sitting comfortably at a table, while setting out soil blocks is much easier when crawling around on the ground. It is easier to see what I’m doing. And it is also more intuitive for untrained helpers. (If I had an Earthway seeder this might be different.)
But I was still worried about the greater difficulty with selecting. Each little plant represents a fairly large investment! It is harder to just toss inferior ones…I do tend to discard the worst 5-10 percent, and I overseed such that I thin two or three plants out of each block. Still, it isn’t like a thickly planted direct-seeded row.
I realized, though, that I could simply group the best plants at one end of the bed for seed saving, and eat all the inferior plants in the rest of the bed. That would allow for intense selection and still permit transplanting.
Another note on this topic; I’m more determined than ever to get rid of row cover in the garden after having a lot of row cover damage due to a windy spring.
Even a simple seed treatment with Johnson Sue compost (where you mix some compost with water and then spritz the seeds with that) has proven very beneficial.
Ooh, I like the idea of sorting the inferior and superior ones, so that you can harvest and eat the inferior ones easily, and remember to leave the superior ones for seed production. That sounds like a great idea.
Brassicas seem to not only tolerate transplant but thrive on it. Some plants do. I’ve seen it and other gardeners have mentioned it to me. John Seymour’s classic Self-Sufficient Gardener details the use of a seedbed for brassicas and leeks, as part of the ancient cottagers’ subsistence cycle that was still practiced in Wales, Scotland and England when Seymour was growing up.
I make the decision about whether to direct-sow or transplant partly on climate and labor considerations, and partly on the type of root I’m dealing with. https://www.quailseeds.com/blog/archives/03-2019
We often still use seed beds for brassicas and leeks here in the UK, they can be direct sown at a fairly high density, then lifted and replanted at wider spacings when the plants are at transplant stage. It means the plants get to germinate in the local soil rather than a sterile growing medium, and it is also useful for space saving in a busy market garden propagation area!
We mostly start our crops in modules where I work, but we’ve been experimenting with adding vermicasts and other homemade inputs to the growing media or soaking trays post sowing with extracts to encourage biology
