The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: DenisCooper on March 19, 2021, 08:23:20 pm
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Hi,
I quite often sow seeds into modules and grow from their before planting out in the field. But I was planning on growing a load of salads and carrots which are tiny seeds. Has anyone got any tips for sowing these straight to the field?
Thanks
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Last year I tried seed tapes for carrots and parsnips. They were successful, but I had expected them to be better spaced to avoid thinning. Tapes would be prohibitively expensive on the scale you might need them for a field.
The only thing I can suggest is to mix the seeds with sand then practice a bit to see what thickness to sprinkle the sand to give a certain density of seeds. Don't do it on a windy day.
Or do you mean to use machinery? When I was young we sowed several acres each year of fodder beet, which has seeds like beetroot, using a tractor drawn seed drill with many channels.
Perhaps I should have asked just how big an area of carrots you intend to sow.
I normally use modules too to start my crops, although not carrots.
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Thanks for the reply.
I’ve looked at seed drills for a tractor but I can’t find anything cheaply that looks any good. But no the carrots wouldn’t beat a massive scale. The salads probably a couple of hundred seeds, we have a large tortoise and he eats soooo much salad.
I looked at the walk behind seeders with the modules too but not sure how good they would be.
I then saw the seeders that look like a syringe but again don’t know how good they’d be.
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I've stopped thinning our carrots as it's such a fiddly job. Just sow them as thinly as possible by hand and harvest them by the fork full, discarding the little ones. The seeds are very cheap and we had a great result last year using that method. Doesn't work for beetroot or leeks though.
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Hi,
I quite often sow seeds into modules and grow from their before planting out in the field. But I was planning on growing a load of salads and carrots which are tiny seeds. Has anyone got any tips for sowing these straight to the field?
Thanks
Salads - I mix the seeds, chuck them onto the ground and rake a little bit.
It's not worth growing salad leaves in modules - waste of time.
Cabbages, courgettes, pumpkins, beans - yes in modules.
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I've stopped thinning our carrots as it's such a fiddly job. Just sow them as thinly as possible by hand and harvest them by the fork full, discarding the little ones. The seeds are very cheap and we had a great result last year using that method. Doesn't work for beetroot or leeks though.
For fine seeds mix an eggcup of dry wood ash & some dry silver sand add the seeds by sprinkling them over the material when it's laid out on a sheet of paper , put it back in the egg cup and thinly sow a pinch at a time along a cord line row If you are able two long strips of planed wood or plastic can be laid a penil thickness apart alongthe string . do your sowing as best as you can between the strip then tip each strip up to drop any seed on it into the drill .
Carrots do best when the soil temp hits 20 oC or better
Now laugh at what I do ,I made some sowing masks .
I got hold of some 2 mm thick plastic sheet . made accurate 13 " squares of it then marked & cut 1/2 " holes in it with a cheap Chinese eBay diamond hole cutter using my bench drill so I have mask patterns of sowing squares with 16 , 12 , 9 & 5 holes in them . As three are no rough edges to the holes it so easy to lay a mask on my 900 mm high raised beds and pop a few seeds on th material then use a finger tip to slide a single seed in a hole ( keep to a rigid sequence so you only put one seed in each hole . When done sieve very fine dry soil over the mask and press it in the holes . Remove the mask and lightly fine sprinkle water over the sown square.
Last year for the two of us I did 3 beds of 9 square feet with 16 carrots per square foot carrots spaced at 3 "apart in all directions .
I cleared the beds a fortnight ago and pressure canned 24 pints of carrots that will see us through until the early carrots are here and on till the end of march 2022.
I've all so sown loads of other seeds using masks to have them thinned from the start ( All our four beds of onion sets are sown accurately using a mask on the bed too .. the four inch spacings makes weeding & feeding them so easy . This year we have three beds of brown onions and one bed of shallots which should give us about 350 onions to harvest & store for use in late August 2021 through to end of May 2022.
I've resorted to this level of precise calculating requirements & sowing so we can plan ahead what crops we can have and adjust our diets accordingly . It works well .. I've also drawn up an accurate sowing planting out & harvesting calendar which brings things into a much better perspective for continuous cropping and no waste .
Meaning we can also use the same packet of seeds stored cool & dry over three or so years .
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I sow by scattering in disorderly rows, and if a few are too close together, I thin them when they're big enough to eat as at least a garnish or perhaps a salad if I have a lot. I can't get lettuce to grow here without going bitter, but I plant other small seeds. by this method. When it's tobacco seeds (the smallest seeds I've ever seen) I scatter them mixed with fine sand and then transplant them when they're 2 inches tall. Tiny seeds, huge plants. Go figure.
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Today I used the masks I mentioned previously to station sow three beds of nine one foot squares per bed with 25 carrot locations per square foot , sowing mid & late carrots.