Harvesting Questions
Answered by: Inge Poot
Question from: Brenda
Posted on: May 2, 2002

I have two questions that I hope you can answer.

1) When the seed packages say, for example, 20-30 days, does this mean from planting date, germination date? The answer is probably very simple but... :O)

2) Also, I am being asked about the approximate weight of each plant at harvest time. Does anyone have information like that available?

For most seed houses, the time to maturity given includes the time it takes the plants to germinate. I do vaguely recall that one seedhouse excluded that time.

At Richters we find that the time to germinate varies greatly depending on the time of year and the temperature the seeds are being kept at and also if you include any pre-treatment that may be necessary. We therefore do not generally give time to maturation.

As for the weight of the plant at maturity, this also varies tremendously. We have found scattered in many publications the average yield per hectare or per acre for a few of the crops we carry and by dividing that by the average planting rate per hectare or per acre you can arrive at an average value per plant. We have recorded whatever values we were able to find in our database, but for your own use you would be much better off trying the plants you are interested in on your soil, in your climate, etc and then weighing all your plants and dividing it by the number of plants you harvested. It takes one year longer, but it would be so much more accurate, especially since many of the values gleaned from various publications come from tropical countries.

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