hi I'm Aaron a crow journey and today we're gonna be showing you how to sew and get continual harvests off your spring greens salad greens throughout in our area the spring and the fall if you live in the Northeast that might just be more of a more of a summer or maybe late spring thing so specifically we're looking at a no-till organic gardening bed with wood chip mulch which are big advocates of so we're going to show you how to how to sow seeds in that scenario if you can see here we have a nice thick layer of woodchips down this is relatively new they haven't really broken down that much if you if your chips are broken down to the point where there's maybe a half inch between the chips and the soil surface and go ahead and direct so those right on the soil surface and the seeds and then water amend the seats will find their way down to the soil and the roots will germinate just fine in that in those conditions but we have probably over an inch of mulch here so we're gonna actually need to break that soil back and then broadcast the seeds and when I say broadcast the seeds specifically what I mean if you've ever seen that on a seed packet is you're gonna want to dis basically distribute those over the area that you're trying to plant relatively evenly as best you can and then put those seeds in so you can either use a spade or a little hand rake I'll just use this since it's here raking back your mulch to expose the area that you want to so I'm just going to use a small example here just maybe a one by one spot so I'm backing out to the soil the mulch just pulled off the bed and I'm gonna grab my grow Johnny seeds here get a few seeds out of the packet and when you're direct sowing like this when you're broadcasting you'll really want to start with a nice thick layer so use a lot of seeds when you're broadcasting and then you're gonna end up fitting these out which we're going to show you how to do next to the point all the way up to the point of final mature plant size but I'm gonna start really thick a lot thicker than I would if these were mature plants and just broadcasting again trying to get a nice even distribution over that soil surface area I'm gonna kind of rough it up a little bit and just to make sure they're in there and making good contact with the soil you don't want it wet but you want it moist just again that will trigger the seed to germinate and then the soil temperatures are those two combinations that the moisture in the soil temperatures trigger see to germinate so we're going to show you next is what to do once your seeds have germinated they're nice and densely soon so what do you do next so I'm sitting over the top of one of our no-till organic lettuce beds you can see I've pulled the mulch back when we direct sowed the seeds and these seeds are nice and densely planted they're still small and maybe two to three weeks after emergence so they're probably less than an inch tall most of them you could technically start thinning them at the stage if you wanted to and those would be microgreens if you wanted to do that we actually prefer to let them get a little larger maybe about three inches tall and those are called baby greens and those are what you get at the grocery store if you get a nice little lettuce pack that says baby greens on it so as they're about three inches tall or taller we also have some other cool stuff mixed in here we have kale and claytonia and other things but down here you can see some of our lettuces that we actually planted five to six six weeks ahead of these guys they're much bigger so these are actually starting to form nice little heads on them we could go ahead and harvest those alfie one or two right now I have him for a nice snack or you know for a nice salad today at lunch but if you also wanted to harvest them we could go ahead and do that and thin out some of them's a lot of the other ones to mature and get bigger so again no-till lettuce but densely planted this is pre pre thinning so you can see how densely planted these guys are we're in a hunt site tide bed here and this is technically abrasca it's an Asian green but about this size we like to eat them as salad greens as well so we're gonna show you how to thin these guys out a little bit these are about three to four inches tall so these are perfect to start thinning out as far as this size and they make a great salad green at this size and what I'm gonna want to do is use a pair of scissors here they're much more surgical than a garden Clippers would be so I'm not worried about you know smashing another plan as I'm going along I can get right in along the soil surface with these with these scissors and cut I'm not gonna want to pull the plants up by the roots and that can cause root disturbance to the other plants that you're leaving behind and also we like to leave the the roots in the ground is to kind of feed the soil microorganisms that keep the other points healthy as well so I'm gonna go along go ahead and then some of these out I'm looking for my smaller ones leaving my nice big ones in here just depending off to some of the other baby greens so these make really nice salad greens when they're this size these are basically baby greens Hounds haitai beautiful purple stems nice anthocyanins in there and I'm gonna just make a salad of these guys for tonight just keep on thinning them and fill out the basket and have a nice salad we're here one of the more mature lettuce beds you can see these plants are much further along than the baby greens are and these are probably about maybe eight to ten inches off the ground and as you can see also we're very densely planted still so to get some of these to get nice big heads on them what I'm gonna want to do is thin them out further so I'm gonna take out my smaller plants and leave about maybe six inches with maybe a little bit more between my final plants to allow and for those great big heads after that the next stage is when they form they get a bolt and they form the big flower stalks and that's what you'd want to let them have let them do if you wanted to save seeds from year to year so I'm gonna go ahead and thin out a few more plants here you can see I've got some some nice salad greens I've already harvested out of here and got a thin out just a bit more to some spacing in here so some more greens and that's gonna allow this one to form its head and it has some more over here so I'm just gonna thin out again to a final spacing probably bout six inches apart between these plants and let them go ahead and form some nice big heads on them and then I'm gonna take these screens if I'm not going to eat them right away I'm gonna take them inside give them a nice rinse under some cold water put them in a ziplock bag and into the fridge so they say good and crisp and firm for when I do eat them so that's how you go and thin out your final bed as far as when your lettuce is about this size and pin it out to its final spacing hey and another great thing about finding out your lettuce greens is you have more food to feed your ducks in that right isn't that right you