Gadenin日本語Get the appSow into cooling soil, not warming soil
Garland chrysanthemum germinates best between 60F and 70F (15C to 21C). Below 50F (10C) the seed sits and sulks for two or three weeks; above 77F (25C) germination falls away sharply and whatever does come up is already primed to run to seed. This is a cool-season crop in the same sense that spinach and coriander are, and the sowing date decides more about the crop than anything you do afterwards.
The best window by a wide margin is late summer into autumn, once the fierce heat has broken. Plants sown then size up as the nights cool, stay in leaf for weeks without any urge to flower, and hold in reasonable condition through light frost. The second window is late winter into early spring, as soon as the soil is workable, but that crop is always a race: warm days and lengthening daylight will push it into bud within a couple of months.
Skip midsummer entirely. Seed sown into soil above 80F (27C) germinates patchily, the seedlings stretch, and the plants throw flower buds at six inches tall. If you want greens through the hot months, sow in the shade of a taller crop and accept that the picking window will be short.
| Soil temperature | Days to emerge | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| 45F to 55F (7C to 13C) | 14 to 21 | Slow and ragged, but the survivors grow on well |
| 55F to 65F (13C to 18C) | 8 to 12 | The reliable range; even stands, sturdy seedlings |
| 65F to 72F (18C to 22C) | 5 to 8 | Fastest emergence, but watch for early stretching |
| Above 80F (27C) | Patchy or none | Poor germination and seedlings that bolt young |
The seed is odd, and it needs shallow cover
The seed does not look like a normal vegetable seed. It is a small ribbed, winged husk, angular and light, and a packet of it feels like chaff rather than grain. That shape means it does not flow through a seeder well and does not settle into a drill neatly, so hand sowing is easier than it sounds: scatter along the row and press it down with the back of a rake.
Cover to a quarter of an inch (6 mm), and no more than half an inch (12 mm). The seedling is small and slow, and it does not have the reserves to push through a hard cap of dried soil. If your ground crusts after rain, cover the row with sieved compost or old potting mix instead of the soil you took out of the drill.
Germination is genuinely uneven. Fifty to seventy per cent is normal even from fresh seed, and the stand comes up over a week rather than overnight. Sow at roughly twice the density you want to end up with, and do not give up on a row until day fourteen. Keep the surface damp through that whole period; a row that dries out on day five will come up in gaps.
Buy fresh seed each year if you can. Garland chrysanthemum seed loses viability faster than most greens, and two-year-old seed that has been stored warm will often give you less than a third of a stand.
Spacing depends on how you intend to pick
There are two ways of growing this crop and they need different spacing. If you plan to shear young leaves as a cut-and-come-again patch, you want a dense stand and you will be pulling most of it within six weeks. If you plan to grow the plants on and pick tips off them repeatedly through a whole season, each plant needs enough room to branch out sideways, and crowding will cost you far more than the extra plants gained.
| Growing style | Spacing in the row | Row spacing | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baby leaf, sheared | 1 in (2.5 cm) | 6 in (15 cm) | Two or three shearings of small tender leaf |
| Tip picking, single stems | 4 in (10 cm) | 10 in (25 cm) | Three or four cuts before the plants tire |
| Tip picking, branched plants | 8 in (20 cm) | 12 in (30 cm) | Repeated cuts over two to three months |
| Container, wide pot | 5 in (13 cm) | Not applicable | Steady picking from a handful of plants |
Thin in two passes, and be honest about it
The plants that come up first shade out the ones behind them, and by the time the stand looks full the damage is already done. Thin early and thin twice. Everything you pull is edible, so the first thinning is a small harvest rather than a loss.
- First thinning, at two true leaves Take the stand down to about two inches (5 cm) apart. Pull rather than cut at this stage; the roots are tiny and neighbors are not disturbed. Wash and eat what you pull, stems and all.
- Second thinning, at four inches tall Go to final spacing. Snip at soil level with scissors instead of pulling, so you do not lift the plant you want to keep. This is the thinning people skip, and it is the one that decides whether you get a branching plant or a single weak stem.
- Water and firm afterwards Thinning loosens the soil around the survivors. Press the ground back around each plant with your fingers and water the row so the roots settle in again the same day.
Sow in succession, and write down what happened
One sowing gives you a picking window of perhaps six weeks before the plants tire or bud up. Sowing a short row every two to three weeks through the cool season keeps a supply going, and costs almost nothing because the seed is cheap and the rows are short.
Record the sowing date, the emergence date, and the date of the first cut for each row. Because germination is so slow, the gap between sowing and emergence in your own garden is the single most useful number to know: once you have it, you stop worrying about a row on day eight and you stop resowing over seed that was going to come up anyway. Note the bed as well, so that next year you can compare an autumn row against a spring row grown in the same ground.