Microgreens And Transplants: The Similarities & Differences.
What Is The Difference Between Microgreens And Transplants? Very Little Except Intention In My Case, As Left Over Microgreens Can Become Transplants.
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The first image on this page is a module tray of mixed salad leaves, which includes quite a few oriental brassicas. I grew them as microgreens and have been harvesting them for a few weeks. So What is the Difference Between Microgreens And Transplants?
But I haven’t needed all my microgreens and it’s a waste to throw them away. So, what’s the solution?
Simple.
I’m going to plant them in a No Dig bed and allow them to grow to maturity. And if you don’t do No Dig, don’t worry, they can be planted in whatever way you prefer. In containers, raised beds, in the soil, you choose.
When To Harvest Transplanted Microgreens
The choice of when to next harvest is really wide open. I can continue harvesting the plants for small leaves or let them grow much bigger before harvesting. That’s the great thing about gardening and growing plants, there are no hard and fast rules. Some of these plants could grow very large, with leaves the size of dinner plates, but I can take them when the size of a baby’s finger nail. It’s entirely up to us as gardeners to decide.
Transplanted MicroGreens Spacing Guide
In the first image there are 40 modules in a tray the size of a seed tray. The plants are close togehjter and don’t need much space as I was harvesting very small leaves or whole plants when thy only had a few small leaves.
Once we decide to transplant we need to space the individual modules/plants further apart. If we are going to harvest leaves at a small size they could be as close as a few inches apart .. perhaps 4-5 inches apart. But if we want to grow larger plants then a spacing of around 8-9 inches apart makes more sense.
The thing is spacing , to an extent, dictates the size of the mature plant. If they are close together they are crowded and remain small. But if given more space can grow into that space and become bigger. Of course there is a maximum size any plant can get. So there’s no point giving them more space than needed was all we get are spaces between the plants where weeds can potentially grow!
In the biointensive garden we can grow crops closely together to achieve a lot of smaller plants, or further apart to get bigger plants. And if we leave space between plants we can plant something else into the gap and have two crops growing.
For example if we grow a block of lettuce that is harvested for leaves we might plant them at 9×9 inches. As they grow and we remove the bottom leaves they will grow a stem and leave some bare soil showing. In this space we can plant our next crop, that will take over when the lettuce finish growing. The second crop could be another module raised crop or a seed crop such as carrots. In this way we can have multiple crops growing in the same place at once.
