Increasing Yields

Get a bunch of food growers together, be they gardeners or farmers, and one of the things they will talk about is how to get more production out of a particular space. Gardeners like to brag about the number of tomatoes they got from one plant. Farmers like to brag about the units of the crop they harvested. It's all focused upon getting the highest yield for your investment.

I'm not immune. I like to get a particular amount of veggies out of a planting too. I grow a lot of my stuff in beds, pallet boxes, or containers. So it's easy to know what to expect out of a particular space. But it doesn't always happen. Lots of things can go wrong. 

One of the things that can go wrong right from the start is that the seeds don't sprout. Over the years I've gotten pretty good at getting conditions right for the seeds. So when I don't see them sprouting it's usually because the seed is dead. Dead seed is common enough. It's almost unheard of to get 100% germination. Normally some seeds don't live for a vast variety of reasons. But it doesn't surprise me when it happens. 

Example.....

Last week I sowed bean seeds in the pallet growing boxes. I had harvested the potatoes and figured on growing a crop of beans before rejuvenating the soil in the boxes. I've done this before with success. So I checked on the progress today. Of the 10 boxes, 9 had a high percentage of success. One box had spotty germination. 

Only half the bean seed sprouted. Lots of empty gaps. So more seeds need to be planted to fill in the blank spaces. 

Now I could have left this as is. But as the title of the post points out, I want to increase my yield of beans from this growing box. The easiest way is to plant more bean seeds in the empty spots. Simple. 

I tend to always fill in empty spots in the garden beds. If it's seeds, it's quick and easy to poke some more into the ground. Yes, the plants will have a week difference in their maturity, but that doesn't matter to me. In fact, it's actuality beneficial because it draws out the harvest, rather than everything being ready to pick the same week. And if it's transplants instead of seeds, I usually have extra leftover seedlings in the mini greenhouses. 

Now all this sounds so simple. Commonsense, you say. But I don't hear many gardeners saying that they do this. They complain about a row being spotty, but didn't think about re-sowing the seeds. Farmers will often go back and overseed a spotty section of a field that failed due to excess rain, or some other reason. I'm not sure why gardeners don't do that. 

Anyway, today I sowed more Maxibel bean seeds in order to fill in the growing box. I have 10 bean varieties started : Maxibel, Pencil Pod, Royal Burgundy, Pauldor, Red Swan, Rocdor, Carson, Capitano, Black Valentine, and Purple Teepee. Not a whole lot of any one type, but it will give me variety. It will be a lots less boring than eating the same bean day offer day.