I wish you all a very good morning and would like to introduce you to a few concepts regarding sowing and growing.
Successional sowing: This is a technique of sowing small quantities of one crop such as lettuce at intervals so that your harvest is spread over a longer period. The idea is not to sow three or four rows of lettuce or any other crop at once, but to sow, say, a quarter or a half a row so that you’ll have a succession of plants ready to eat instead of a glut of plants, many of which will be wasted.
Another technique to make better use of your garden space is intercropping. When you plant out rows of, say, cabbage they are likely to be 18” or more apart, and to start off with that means that a lot of soil is wasted until the plants have matured and are almost touching. So having planted out your cabbage or some other crops which take several weeks to mature, you immediately sow a quick growing crop which makes use of this empty space. It’s a good way to maximize your cropping. So for example you could sow lettuce in between your rows of cabbage or rows of tomatoes.
Thinning out and transplanting: Many gardeners find it very difficult to sow their plants such as lettuce and cabbage so that they are evenly and correctly spaced. My own view on this is that it’s not worth bothering about too much provided you thin out the surplus seedlings quickly so that what is left has room to develop properly. In a climate such as Guyana’s, growth is so rapid that seedlings have to be thinned out very quickly otherwise they will smother their neighbours. With plants like lettuce, seedlings are thinned out gradually, so the first thins are spaced at 3” intervals, and then a week or so later to 6” and then to their final spacing of 9 or 10” a few days later. This gradual thinning is to make sure that if any die out you always have young replacements to fill in the gap. Certainly with members of the Brassica family thinning can be used to plant up other areas of ground, or even given away to your friends or neighbours.
Many seedlings in rows come up so thick that they are not thinned gradually nor are they suitable for giving away. If you have a crop like this the surplus seedlings are just chopped out with a hoe to leave the remaining plants to fill in the empty spaces.
One particularly important point to bear in mind is that if you have seedlings which are to be transplanted, they must be watered before you start the job. Young cabbages are normally puddled to help them survive. This means that their roots are immersed in a mud /water mixture at planting time to help them survive.
In Guyana, as the last few months have shown, you can have excessive amounts of rainfall which makes gardening almost impossible because of flooding. One obvious way to try and overcome this problem is to grow in raised beds, which allow water to drain away through the channels in between. Beds can be as wide as three feet, and that is sufficient spacing to allow the entire width to be reached for weeding and applying fertilizer, insecticides and fungicides.
Take care and may your God go with you wherever you may be.
