BEST YIELDS: LEAVE ROOM BETWEEN YOUR PLANTS

It is so tempting to look at the plants in your garden and believe that the more plants you have the better you vegetable yield or the better your flowers will look unfortunately; the plants seem to have a different idea. Cramped plants will often not reach a nice size or produce an abundant amount of flowers and/or fruit. Even plants that do not have flowers or fruit will often become dwarfs and never reach their full maturity. Any experienced Michigan logger knows you must thin out your trees so you can grow some giants. That is all about managing a woodlot. I manage both gardens and a woodlot and in areas of my woodlot that I have kept the trees thinned out the remaining trees have become giants. The neglected areas of my woodlot have many stunted trees that are the same age as the giants in other parts of my woodlot.

My gardens adhere to the same law of management as my woodlot. When I plant my tomatoes plants two feet apart vs. planting them 1 1/2 feet apart the yields increase as the plants are healthier and simply produce more and heavier fruits when they are given just a bit more room. Likewise, all my other plants do much better when I keep them thinned. Now thinning to many implies you just pull up the extra plants to allow more space between the remaining ones. However, you can transplant some of these plants into other areas of your yard or even into containers so that you will still get some benefits. For instance, I always transplant my squash and pickle plants. Sometimes I have an area where the seed either did not take or the seeds were eaten up by varmints. So I fill the holes with an extra plant that was growing up too close to its kin plants. I also use container gardens as a way to make up space and hence, I fill my containers with extra tomatoes, pepper etc., and plants.

Most plants and seeds come with instructions on the distance you should plant your plants and information on future culling of plants to realize the best yield. It is important that as a gardener you make a commitment to reading and becoming more educated so that you can make the right decisions of life and death concerning the plants you have to cull.