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8 Crops You Should ONLY Direct Sow (And Why)

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There’s also nothing like understanding how to plant in the garden. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes trying to transplant everything under the sun. And let’s just say some of it hasn’t gone that well. So in this article, I am going to give you eight crops that these days we always direct sow. 

Let’s begin!

Corn

Corn is a summer classic. It is something we all look forward to every single year. It comes in a couple of different varieties, whether it’s sweet, flint, or dent. The cool thing about this plant is that it can be used in many different ways. Sweet corn can be eaten fresh, it could be cooked and then eaten right off the cob. And of course, you can make tortillas and popcorn out of the other varieties.

So, it’s a very cool plant to have in your garden. Now you can technically transplant this plant. It’s totally fine.

But the problem that you run into when you transplant corn is that it can often blow over when it actually gets broken off and planted directly in the ground. You get a much better root development system. The corn is not going to blow over and it’s just generally going to be producing better for you.

At least that’s been my experience. When I have transplanted corn in the past, I ended up having to tie it up and support it because it actually blew over in the wind. Now the other thing I quickly want to mention here about corn is the four by eight-foot section, ideal for planting corn. You don’t want to plant corn in a straight line or in a skinny bed because it needs wind to pollinate. So, by planting it in a nice chunky block and directly going into the ground, you’re going to have a stable plant that doesn’t blow over in the wind.

You’re going to have great pollination because you have them nice and close together in a grid and you’re going to get an absolutely delicious harvest of corn. So, corn, you can technically transplant it, but we would always recommend direct sowing to get a nice sturdy plant.

Sunflower

There is a plant that I absolutely love so much that not only have I grown one as big as a manhole, but I have also eaten the entire head of one. And yes, of course, I am talking about the sunflower. So, the reason that I like to direct sow these bad boys are because first of all, after you plant one and let it grow out and maybe you don’t harvest it for a cut flower and you let the birds eat it and they kind of spread the seeds around, it’s just going to direct sow itself.

To be honest with you, a lot of the ones that are growing around my garden this season, I did not even plant. But the thing with sunflowers is that they don’t like transplanting in a very specific way because there’s a very sensitive taproot on sunflowers that when transplanted tends to result in a shorter sunflower, even if it’s the exact same variety.

If I was to transplant a mammoth sunflower versus direct sowing it, the direct sowing one 99 times out of a hundred would actually be a taller plant. So, if you want a vigorous and full sunflower, which we all do, I really recommend direct sowing it. If you’re very, very sad about how long it might take to germinate, there are two things you can do.

One would be to soak in water overnight and then plant or the second is to just snip the very, very end of the sunflower seed. Just a tiny little bit allows that water to get in there when you plant it directly in the ground.

Peas

When it comes to snacking in the garden, I have a very clear winner and it actually comes in many different forms, much like the corn. And I am talking today about peas. Now the cool thing about peas is that there are snow peas, there’s snap peas, there’s shelling peas, which in my opinion are the most underrated of all the peas. But today we’re going to talk about sugar snap peas.

Now, the cool thing about peas is that they don’t get very big, and you could plant them very densely. The reason why you generally don’t want to transplant them is because they have very weak roots. A lot of people have actually even done something called the gutter transplant method where you actually get a rain gutter, fill it with a little bit of soil, fill it with peas, and then your kind of just slide the entire plant of peas into the ground.

So, you don’t mess with the roots at all, but even easier, you could just directly sow them and skip that whole process. So, what I like to do is find a section of my garden that has a fence. take a tool like a Cobra head. And it’s very simple. All you have to do is take that and dig yourself a nice pretty healthy furrow, right along the fence that you’re going to be putting them in. And then simply take your peas, whichever one you’re going to.

If you haven’t tried growing shelling peas, I highly encourage you guys to try it. They’re literally like candy. None of them even make it into my house because we eat them all off the plant directly.

Now, when it comes to growing peas, if you have had trouble in the past getting them to actually germinate, what you can do is soak them overnight in a cup of water, and then they’ll be much more likely to germ. Then drop the peas in. Don’t worry about spacing at all. You could literally put these like an inch apart and they’ll do just fine.

They can be planted very tightly. And then all you are going to do is simply cover them up. That’s all you have to do when it comes to direct sowing peas.

They grow very easily, very readily after that. And they don’t last for very long. So, the cool thing is that once you get a couple of harvests and it starts to get hot, the peas will come out and you’ll have more space in your garden to plant out all those delicious summer vegetables.

Carrots

Many years ago in my small urban front yard garden, where I had about 20 square feet of space, I tried to transplant this next crop and it was a catastrophic failure and a waste of my time and my life essence. So, these days I always directly sow my carrots. So, a carrot’s obviously a root crop. You eat the taproot of the plant. When you grow carrots, you really don’t want to disturb this. They like a nice sort of loose, almost sandy loam type of soil. So transplanting is just going to disturb that and cause you all sorts of problems. If you want a really classic variety, the Danvers is the one to go with.

That’s the biggest issue with carrots. It takes about 10 to 14 days for them to start to sprout. And if you don’t keep them nice and moist during that time, they’ll die, and you’ll get this weird patchiness to the carrots that you don’t want. And so, what’ll happen at this point is they’ll start to sprout up and you really want to thin them out to about one every two inches or so. In fact, that’s exactly what I do. So, carrots just don’t want to be transplanted. Don’t try it and make your life easier with a couple of these direct sow tips.

And one more pro tip, you can actually store these in sand, and they’ll last up to six months outside of a refrigerator.

Beans

When it comes to trying to get some amount of protein growing in your garden, it can be quite challenging because most vegetables just simply don’t have that much. But there is one plant and that is the humble bean. Beans come in many different flavors, many different shapes and sizes. And specifically, they’re either really bush beans or pole beans. So today we’re going to be talking about pole beans because I think a lot of people don’t understand exactly how they grow.

When you do want to grow a pole bean, it’s very easy to directly seed them because you could put them right up on the trellis that you’re going to grow them on. Or actually, you could even plant them alongside your corn to set up a three-sister’s garden, which is really quiet a lot of fun. Now the thing that I wanted to mention about beans is that if you take a look at this one right here, this is an established pole bean.

What happens is that it wraps around the structure that it’s growing on. Now the way that it wraps is actually by wrapping, the main thing I wanted to call out though, is that if you are planting beans on a trellis, you don’t want to plant it somewhere where it doesn’t have a vertical section to climb. So, this trellis has these horizontal gaps.

If I were to put the bean straight down the middle, it couldn’t climb up because it doesn’t have tendrils. The way it climbs is that it physically wraps around the structure and that is how it’s held in place. So, make sure you have a nice vertical structure for the beans to climb on. Other than that, all you have to really do is take your beans and come down to the base. take your bean and just put it simply at the base under the ground.

Now the other thing I want to mention is that while you can of course transplant beans, we ran an experiment last year where we did one section of the garden where we transplanted beans. And then we immediately at the same time directly sowed the exact same varieties next to them. What happened was that the transplanted beans actually stagnated for a little bit. And by the time they started growing, the direct sowed ones actually caught up and surpassed the transplanted beans. So, there’s nothing to say you can’t do either one, but if you have the space already for it, it’s always better to just directly sow your beans. They’re always going to catch up to those ones that were transplanted.

Radish

Some plants are just simply not worth transplanting. And that’s because they grow so fast that by the time you grow it as a transplant, you might as well have just put it in the ground because it’s going to be ready in just a few weeks. In this case, I am talking about radishes. Now I have a love-hate relationship with radishes.

They’re not something where I’m ever like, oh man, I wish I had a radish right now. It would be so delicious. But I am starting to respect them ever since somebody told me that you should eat your radish with a little bit of salt, maybe even try baking it, and tastes like a potato. Definitely not a potato, but it did taste better. So I am trying to grow a little bit more radishes so I can experience them a little bit better. They are good on salads, I guess.

The thing is, it is like the French breakfast radish. It’s ready in something like 28 days. So why would you bother transplanting it when you could just put it straight in your garden and get ready to harvest it in just a matter of a few weeks? All I’m going to do is do that. Just let them sprinkle wherever they grow. They’re going to be ready so fast.

I don’t care whatsoever if they take up any space. So, all I’m going to do for the seeds that I intentionally planted is simply press them into the soil, and lightly bury them. And like I said, in just about a month I’m going to be harvesting radishes straight out of this bed. And then I just have to figure out how to eat them.

Watermelon

This next one is a summer classic. One that I’ve grown a few seasons in a row now to great success and also extreme satisfaction. Whether you’re eating it straight out of the field or you’re going to chill it and you put it into a smoothie. Of course, I’m talking about a watermelon. And this also would apply to any melon that you are growing because you plant them in a very specific way, and they don’t really like to be disturbed once they’re planted.

So, roots that don’t want to be disturbed, you should probably direct sow, right? Put it right in the place that it’s going to be until it gets harvested. And the way to do that is the following. So, take a trowel of some kind. You can make a mound, by hilling some up yourself or just taking some soil from another area. plant it on a mound and you want to plant this out. Maybe soil temperatures need to be 70 to 90-ish degrees air temperatures, somewhere in that same range.

So, create a nice mound. Then create a slight hole and drop two to four seeds per mound. Then cover it up with extra soil and press it down. You give this a nice water in. And if you were to plant even more watermelon, you’d space these mounds out about four to six feet apart. because these guys sprawl like crazy. So, plants in general that don’t like to be disturbed, just put them where they’re going to be. And this technique works really, really well.

Cucumber

The last pick for you guys today is maybe a little bit less conventional because classically most people always transplant this, but I’m here to tell you that I am not going to be transplanting it anymore. And that is actually the cucumber. And I’ll tell you exactly why. When it comes to growing cucumbers, they actually have very sensitive roots.

So what tends to happen is you’ll take your cucumber transplant, put it in the garden and it’ll just kind of sit there for a few days, maybe even a week or two before it even starts growing. Meanwhile, if you direct-seed your cucumbers, which I’m about to tell you how to do right on the A-frame trellis, then you don’t have that problem. By the time this catches up to that transplant, it’s going to far exceed it.

So here’s the deal. If you need to plan your garden, you need to figure out spacing and you don’t have the time, then go ahead and do your transplant. But when you do, do it very carefully and do not disturb the roots.

Now, if you want to avoid that altogether, then I highly encourage that you just direct seed them. So what you should be doing is using a two-by-four-foot total distance trellis. Then direct seeding it so that they’re about a foot apart.

Now, when it comes to cucumber spacing, if you’re growing on a trellis, you could get away with just a foot apart between each plant. So, take two seeds because when you’re direct seeding, you never know if they’re actually going to come up or not, or maybe one’s going to get munched on by a pest.

So what you should do is at the base, right underneath one of these little legs of A-frame, and take two seeds, put them in the ground, and press them into the soil. And then come about a foot away. and put another two seeds.

The really cool thing about growing cucumbers on an A-frame trellis is that the plant will climb to the top and then you can start draping it over. By that point, the plant is now going to be four or five feet long. It’s going to be nearing the end of its lifespan. You could just take some more cucumber seeds, direct seed the other side, and start a new succession of cucumbers. By the time that one starts growing, this won’t be spent and you can remove it, let that plant climb over to the other side, and just back and forth, back and forth direct sow cucumbers on either side until your season is over.

Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.

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