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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,
03:17is single-handedly the most important tool that we use here at Epic Gardening
03:21when it comes to software.
03:22And the reason I say that is because many of you watching have supported Epic
03:26for four or five years now, selling products directly to you guys,
03:31our audience. Back in 2019, when I first started doing that,
03:34the first thing I installed was Shopify. I put a simple store up.
03:38Some of you probably even remember it. I'll put a screenshot up for you.
03:42And it was simple, but it got the job done. And of course, these days,
03:46not only do we have a Shopify store for Epic Gardening,
03:49but also our seed company, Botanical Interests.
03:51One of the very first things that we did when we first acquired Botanical
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.
04:22There's a magic media editor where you can do quick changes on the fly,
04:26as well as checking analytics while we were literally packing orders day in and
04:30day out. So whether you have a business online or offline,
04:33you sell products or services, to me,
04:36there is only one choice for a commerce platform in the modern era.
04:39And that of course would be Shopify. We wholeheartedly recommend it.
04:43Literally you would not be watching this video without Shopify helping to power
04:48part of Epic Gardening. So if you want a free trial,
04:49you can check it out in the video description.
04:51I wholeheartedly recommend it with every fiber of my being.
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.