Hi everybody, I'm Christy Wilhelmi from Gardenerd and today we're talking about thinning because
I get a lot of questions about what is thinning or how to thin.
So let's start with seed packets.
Most of the time when you plant root vegetables like these carrots, these parsnips, these
beets you see on the back it will say either "space after thinning" a certain inch apart
or what this says which is thinning "when 2 inches tall, thin to 1 every 4 inches."
And that's exactly what it means.
Because when you're growing carrots and root vegetables they need to grow without competition.
And it's important to not have them growing too close together.
So when you plant seeds usually you plant more than one seed per square inch or whatever
and so you have to go back and thin, which means removing all but the one that you need
to grow in that space.
And I know it's heartbreaking and people have a lot of a hard time doing it, especially
once they get to this tall.
But we're here at this height, which is way beyond 2" and so I'm going to show you how
to thin.
So you can see I've got three carrots that are growing right up against one another.
There's one here, one here, and one here.
And, you know, these need to be at least an inch or two apart.
So in order to thin this, I'm going to take my shears and I'm going to cut.
I know this hurts to see, but I'm going to cut this carrot out right below the soil surface.
And this will go to the chickens and now these two carrots can grow up without any real competition
from that.
It will just disintegrate underground.
So you're probably wondering why can't I just dig out one of these carrots that's kind of
in the way and move it to somewhere else.
Well, once it's gotten to this size, it really doesn't transplant well.
But I'm going to show you how to transplant really fresh, new thinnings to a new home.
So we're going to go over here.
Okay, so this is one square foot of carrots and you can see there's a carrot here, one
carrot here, one carrot here, one carrot here, one carrot here, and one carrot here, but...
when you get to here.
I want to make sure you can see this, there's one, two, three, four carrots and these can
be transplanted because they are very young.
So what I'm going to do is make a hole.
You want to drill a hole first where you are going to move your carrots to, and make sure
it's nice and deep because the roots a long you don't want any competition.
So, I'm going to make three holes, because I've got four seedlings and I'm going to leave
one where it is.
Then I'm going to get this is an old plant marker that I use as a surgical tool like
chopsticks.
You're going to go in and hold the leaf, not the stem, and you're going to dig under ground
and just wiggle around until this lifts.
You might hear it crackle and snap a little.
And you can see I've got the whole root.
I'm going to move over here and tuck it into its new home and something tells me that's
dill and not a carrot.
But we'll find out.
So, I'm going to take another one.
See there's three that are really small, so I'm going to leave this guy because he's survival
of the fittest.
I'm going to loosen this and lift that out there.
And put it in this hole right here and backfill.
And afterwards of course you want to water these deeply so that they settle into their
new home and all the air pockets come out.
I'm going to take one more.
That should come right out.
And yes it does.
And tuck it in.
And voila!
Now this guy can mature where he is and everybody else will grow in in its place.
So it's really important to thin your seedlings.
I know it's really hard but you can do it.
You have two ways to do it now: you can either cut them off if they've gotten too big, or
you can transplant them if they're really, really small.
Either way, you're setting up your garden to be happy and healthy from here on out.
So if you want to learn more about thinning and growing your own food, go to Gardenerd.com.
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Happy gardening.