The experiment.

[Ozark Lady]

*cough* stands up...
I confess, I can not kill a seedling that I planted on purpose. I may move it many times, but use scissors to snip it off... I can't.

It may be in the weirdest excuse for a pot, but I won't snip it off!

Is there hope for me, doc?

[Dixana]

I don't think we need help, I think more people should be like us plant loving gardeners and the world will be a better place.
Though I am beginning to realize how much more attached I am to my self seeded plants.
I might cry come fall when I cut them all off and return to staring at brown dirt.........do any winter crops grow in WI-zone 4?

I should also comment, organic peppers is doing better and starting to grow more nicely since I dug it out and redid the soil. There is a such thing as too much of a good thing (mushroom compost does not drain for squat)

[Decado]

Zone 4 you could plant parsnips and leave them over the winter to sweeten. But I'm not sure how much of anything could grow with the ground solid and snow on top.

[Toil]

*cough* stands up...
I confess, I can not kill a seedling that I planted on purpose. I may move it many times, but use scissors to snip it off... I can't.

It may be in the weirdest excuse for a pot, but I won't snip it off!

Is there hope for me, doc?

well if you are moving the pants you obviously are organizing and conserving, and not hoarding.

lol its about a third of gardeners I think, and about 90% of new gardeners. I remember the first time I thinned, and it just felt so wrong. Like, I paid for those seeds, man! Sometimes I wonder why they bother with the spacing recommendations on seed packets and websites. Once I started doing it I realized it was not so bad, and that you can eat many of the shoots (not tomatoes, that will definitely make you sick). From peas to rutabaga to little radish greens and lettuce, it's all very tasty.

like HG said, if you have different species growing together, it can be very close. Then, you have less thinning to worry about.

I'm fiddling with seedballs now, and it seems to me that is a great way to sowing with less thinning. You decide when you make the seedballs how dense you want the seeds, and then again when you chuck them. You can also combine species so they are automatically together. Plus the ants don't steal your seeds so much (although ants stealing seeds is cool to watch.

OL, why not start with the weeds? Like a helpful annual weed that normally chokes things when left alone. I've tried it this season with the lamb's quarters. They get much bigger than I'm used to seeing there, and they seem to fend off mugwort and such. But without thinning, they look stressed and they grow slow. Purple deadnettle has been even better at fighting mugwort, and it is very beautiful IMO. But if you are moving them, you know it's about spacing already. I would just mention that pulling them out to move them is a disturbance you could reduce easily if you wanted.

I snip now, and I leave the "carcass" right on the ground where it was growing.

[The Helpful Gardener]

There's a lot of us gardeners that need to stand up at the Plantaholics Anonymous meeting...

But not me. I'm good. I can quit plants anytime I want...

HG

[Ozark Lady]

Lamb's quarters I know.

I read about them, so I pursued them until I got them.
Now they are the noxious weeds to me. But, my goats love them.
I do pull alot of weeds for the goats.

I need to go google mugwort, I have no clue what it is.

[The Helpful Gardener]

Mugwort is an artemisia A. vulgaris), that like the majority of the genus can be rather invasive... the weed is a non-native invasive...

Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) seems to be a circumboreal found nearly everywhere, and it's exact origins are unclear, but Jared Diamond notes it as the mast food source for the natives of the Northeast before the arrival of corn (about 650-800 years ago). Native enough for me, and I trust the good doctors archeobotany more than the Wiki.

Purselane (Portulaca oleracea) is likewise a circumboreal with a spotty past and questions as to its native status; it has certainly been here a long time, and seems to predate Columbus, so I'll settle for native there as well...

The mugwort is noted as the wormwood of abisinthe fame, so the nervous damage noted with the liquer can be assumed to go along with the herb; I wouldn't eat tons of it. And the oxalin in the purselane is a noted contributor to kidneystones, so easy on that, too. But I've been eating lambsquarters by the pound and loving it; toil if you crop them with a sickle, leaving some lower leaves, they resprout and branch, allowing the little ones around them to fill in. Works great.

HG

[mrsgreenthumbs]

*cough* stands up...
I confess, I can not kill a seedling that I planted on purpose. I may move it many times, but use scissors to snip it off... I can't.

It may be in the weirdest excuse for a pot, but I won't snip it off!

Is there hope for me, doc?

lol the more comment of yourse I read the more I wounder if we were sister separated at birth (and changed skin tones along to way lol) I snip only if I have to for the best of the strong of the two (and if I can't salvage the extra) But mostly I will take the extra plants and offer them to friends and family and if they don't want it I'll offer it free on CL or freecycle, and if THEY don't want it then I finally give in and stick it someplace it will be happier. lol Me and my stinkin green thumbs... the DH had to put in a whole new bed this spring for all my left over's lol.

[Toil]

Ah good tip hg. Thanks!

[gixxerific]

There's a lot of us gardeners that need to stand up at the Plantaholics Anonymous meeting...

But not me. I'm good. I can quit plants anytime I want...

HG

the first step is admission, we can help you through it.

[2cents]

I can't believe it,
I've been pulling lambs quarter for decades....
Never thought it could be eaten.
I have some small ones in the garden now.
Looks like a meal in a couple weeks.

[The Helpful Gardener]

Yeah, it's funny how many "weeds" are good food. I am leading a weed walk tomorrow (fundraiser for purchasing an organic farm as a teaching center) where we will be talking about purselane and dock and orache and jewelweed and a bunch of stuff you have been weeding when you could have just been munching...

Eat the weeds!

HG

[rainbowgardener]

Jewelweed? The stuff with the hollow stems that when cut ooze a fluid that is soothing for poison ivy? Not something it would have ever occurred to me to eat. What part of it is edible and is actually something anyone would ENJOY eating or just that you can eat it and nothing bad happens?

[The Helpful Gardener]

Enjoyment is a relative term and I will not subject anyone to my interpretations, but you can eat the whole plant up until about six inches tall; after that the stems get tough (fairly high mineral contents are healthy, but chewy). After that I take just leaves. Best as a cooked green; steam for five minutes, butter, salt and pepper to taste...

And I have never seen MG weeds; certainly organic...

HG

[garden5]

I kind of wonder about the theory of crowded tomatoes producing the same amount of tomatoes as fewer plants, but more widely spaced.

I read of a study that was done on a commercial tomato farm overseas and they took three or four patches and planted each one with a different spacing of tomatoes: 1 ft., 18 in., 2 ft. (well something to that effect).

They then looked at the yield (in tons, of course) and found that the patch with the further spacing had the most tomatoes per plant, but the lowest yield overall. On the other hand, the plot with the closest spacing had the lowest yield per plant, but the highest overall. Now, this tells me that you get more tomatoes off the extra plants you squeeze in than you loose from lowered production on each plant.