We Ignored Plant Spacing Rules, Here's What Happened

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00:00What happens when you want to plant some veggies in your garden,

00:02you look at the back of the seed packet and decide to throw the plant spacing

00:05requirements completely out the window.

00:08That's exactly what we did in this experiment and we were pretty surprised at

00:12what we found. So in my hand, I have one of our seeds. This is red acre cabbage,

00:16and I have red acre cabbage seedlings down here.

00:18I'm going to read the back of the official botanical interest packet to show you

00:21what we should do. And then we're going to break all of those rules together.

00:24So according to our official packet,

00:26we are supposed to be planting a group of three seeds every 12 to 24 inches.

00:29So one to two feet apart and then between rows,

00:3224 to 36 inches or two to three feet apart. Now,

00:35it kind of begs the question,

00:37why does a cabbage have let's say different spacing than a tomato or a carrot?

00:41Well, think about a carrot.

00:42What you're trying to do when you're growing vegetables at home, like I am,

00:44hopefully you are,

00:45is you're trying to get as much as you can out of the space that you have.

00:48Certainly when I first started gardening over 12 years ago,

00:50I didn't have this much space. I had almost nothing.

00:52And I had to get as much as I could get. So take a carrot.

00:55They grow about one to three inches in diameter.

00:58So you can space them roughly about two or three inches apart and the carrots

01:01will kind of line up really nicely next to each other without taking too much

01:05nutrition and competing with one another.

01:08And that's really the thing you want to avoid with something like a carrot or

01:11these other vegetables that you grow. But cabbages growing above the ground,

01:15have a little bit of a different requirement. They grow really big. In fact,

01:18you think of cabbages as a cabbage head,

01:20but there's a ton of these accessory leaves that grow around a cabbage that will

01:24sort of run into one another if you space them too close together.

01:27So let me share with you the three ways we are going to space.

01:31So here's what we have going here.

01:32We have a four by four grid of my test garden that's been broad forked.

01:37I've thrown some water on it. It's nice and hydrated, nice and loose,

01:39ready to accept and grow some huge, huge cabbages.

01:42What we're going to do is we're going to have three different spacings.

01:44I have four cabbages spaced 12 inches apart right here.

01:48We'll do three cabbages spaced 18 inches apart right there.

01:51Two cabbages spaced two feet apart or 24 inches right over there.

01:55And the whole thing I'm wondering, and I'm done with the answer really,

01:59is am I going to see smaller cabbages here and massive ones over there

02:03because there's more space, they can get more nutrients, more access to sun,

02:07water, or am I maybe going to see the exact same results?

02:10I'm curious what you think. So comment down right now,

02:12if you think the 12 inch, 18 or 24 inch are going to win.

02:16My personal bet is probably 18 and 24 will do similar and 12 might be a little

02:20bit small. That's my guess, but we shall see.

02:22So let's go ahead and get to planting.

02:24The one thing I'm going to do is add a little bit of granular organic fertilizer,

02:28roughly a tablespoon or so. Nothing too crazy to every single hole,

02:33so they're all on an even playing field.

02:37Going in with the two foot spacing or the last row.

02:39And I just wanted to mention that I'm doing the exact same amount of spacing

02:42between the rows as well. It's about two feet and three inches.

02:46There we go.

02:49We'll plant it in. We have a couple more things to do.

02:51I need to water this and then I'm going to protect these cabbages with critter

02:55covers, which is sort of a mesh little basket. Because in my climate,

02:59it's still pretty hot and there are predators that will eat these alive unless I

03:02protect them in this young stage of their life. But I'm excited.

03:04We have the experiment set up. Let's see what happens in a couple of weeks.

03:08While we let those cabbages go on their very long growth journey,

03:11I'm here in the greenhouse to talk about today's sponsor, Shopify.

03:14Shopify is a commerce platform that, no joke,

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03:21when it comes to software.

03:22And the reason I say that is because many of you watching have supported Epic

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03:31our audience. Back in 2019, when I first started doing that,

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03:38Some of you probably even remember it. I'll put a screenshot up for you.

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03:46not only do we have a Shopify store for Epic Gardening,

03:49but also our seed company, Botanical Interests.

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03:54Interests is move them off of a very old commerce platform that I had to

03:59literally call someone to make a change to the website over to Shopify.

04:03And it was one of the biggest improvements we made that year. In fact, in 2020,

04:08when things were going crazy because of all the stuff going on in the world

04:11and gardening was taking off,

04:13both Jacques and I were in the warehouse shipping orders for you guys all the

04:16time. And we would be using Shopify on the mobile app,

04:19getting order notifications, being able to make changes to the store.

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04:54I absolutely love Shopify.

04:56Thank you so much to them for sponsoring this video and now let's check out those

04:59cabbages. It has been a few weeks and the cabbage has disappeared. Why?

05:03Because we're still getting those cabbage moths in our climate.

05:06So I put a little hoop cover over this and let's reveal the growth

05:10after just about two or three weeks now. Okay, let's see what we got here guys.

05:14Okay. That's surprising. That is very surprising. First of all,

05:17I'm a little bummed because you can see we do have some pest damage.

05:21These damn cabbage loopers are everywhere in my garden and sometimes they can

05:24squeeze through even the most severe protection. So the ones up front,

05:28the two feet spacing, those have been eaten the most.

05:31And they also look honestly roughly the same size as the rest of these.

05:35So I'm going to come through, hand pick off all the caterpillars.

05:38We might even spray with a little bit of BT just for the purpose of this

05:41experiment, cover them back up and we'll see you in a few weeks. Well, my friends,

05:44it's been a while since we last checked in here and I thought we were on death's

05:48door with these cabbages because of the crazy cabbage worm pressure we had

05:53earlier in their growing cycle.

05:54But I'm happy to say my dreams of becoming a cabbage patch kid have come true

05:59because we have our cabbage spacing experiment pretty much fully grown out.

06:03So it's time to harvest. But before I do,

06:05the things I'm noticing are something very surprising and maybe not at the same

06:10time.

06:10The middle cabbage in our 18 inch row and the two middle cabbages in our 12 inch

06:15row are markedly smaller than any cabbage on the exterior.

06:20Now of course this makes sense.

06:22These have the least space for their roots to run and suck up a bunch of

06:26nutrients and water and just get a lot bigger.

06:28The edge is quite a bit bigger and our two front ones with the most spacing,

06:3424 inches, have sized up.

06:36Though I will put the caveat in that since they were so hit by cabbage worms,

06:40they might be a little stunted because of that and not because of spacing.

06:44But it's time to get the harvest going.

06:45So what we're going to do is harvest the rows out and then we will weigh them

06:49and average out the weight of a cabbage. So for this one, I'll divide it by four,

06:53this one three, this one two. And we'll see, is there a difference?

06:57Let's get to harvesting.

06:59So what I'll also do is I'll remove all of these fan leaves and get down to

07:05just the head of cabbage to try to keep it as fair as possible.

07:08Cause really when you're growing cabbage, you care about the head,

07:10not about all the fan leaves. We have our cabbages all harvested up,

07:14trimmed up and ready to weigh.

07:16So we're going to start out with the ones that were spaced as the seed packet

07:21deems correct, which would be our 24 inch or two foot spacing,

07:25which would be these two right over here. Now,

07:28what's interesting is these two,

07:30neither of these is the physically largest cabbage.

07:33This would be the physically largest cabbage over here in the 12 inch spacing,

07:37but this was on the corner.

07:38So we'll talk about why that might not matter in a second here,

07:41but let's go ahead with our first measurements.

07:49So our 24 inch spacing cabbage is an average of 3.1

07:54kilograms, which I'd be pretty pleased with.

07:57It's over a five pound cabbage. That's pretty good.

07:59Let's move on to 18 inch spacing here.

08:06The average weight of our 18 inch spacing cabbages is a hair under the average

08:10weight of our 24 inch spaced cabbages at 3,028

08:15grams or just a hair over three kilograms to the 3.1 we had over here.

08:21Okay. Onto our tightly spaced cabbages.

08:23I'm going to start out with the two small ones, but take a look. I mean,

08:25these are probably going to be the lightest cabbages of the entire bunch.

08:30But over here we have what I think is going to be the heaviest.

08:37The average of the four cabbages is actually lower

08:42than the other two by quite a bit.

08:44We're coming in at 2.74 kilograms.

08:48So just a couple hundred grams underneath the average of either of these,

08:52making on a per cabbage basis,

08:55our 24 inch spacing cabbage the heaviest.

08:58But average cabbage weight isn't the only way to slice this up.

09:01If I was just going for biggest on a per cabbage basis,

09:05I might space them out this way. But if I was space constrained,

09:08I might still go over here because we didn't add up the total weight.

09:12So on a total weight basis,

09:13the numbers change drastically in favor of spacing tighter.

09:17So if you're a space constrained gardener,

09:19this might be the way to go.

09:20Cause you're getting just way more actual cabbage density.

09:24So let me read it off for you. Over here on our very widely spaced 24 inch

09:29cabbages, we have a total of 6.2 kilograms worth of cabbage.

09:33Over here on our 18 inch, we have nine kilograms.

09:37And then over here on our 12 inch,

09:39we have a shocking almost 11 kilograms of cabbage. So to me,

09:43the results of this experiment is a tale of two worlds. On one hand,

09:46if I wanted to max out my plant's yield on a per plant basis,

09:50I would follow the seed packet to a T.

09:52I'd space it out as instructed. And even between rows,

09:56I would give it ample space and I would really care for that plant to max it

10:00out. If I was going for pure production, I would space it a lot tighter.

10:04If I didn't have a lot of space.

10:05And the other thing I'll say is it does depend a lot on the plant.

10:09Something like a cabbage,

10:10which is growing above the ground needs some space for sure for those fan leaves

10:14to spread out and get a lot of energy from the sun,

10:17suck up a lot of nutrients from the soil.

10:19But I couldn't really cram carrots together or maybe cram potatoes

10:24together like I might be able to in this cabbage.

10:27So this is certainly not an all encompassing experiment,

10:29but it was a fun one. And I'm curious what takeaways you got from this.

10:33So let me know down below.

10:34We do experiments like this here at Epic Gardening to figure out what actually

10:37works in the garden and what is sort of an old wives' tale.

10:40So if you want to check out more of those,

10:42go right here and check this playlist out. And until next time guys,

10:45good luck in the garden and keep on growing.

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