TOPIC: Experienced Growers - what would you do differently - list your failures !

Hey Guys...

We often show pics of our best beds, plants, and talk about our success.

It's easy to do that.

Thought I would start a little different post and lets all pitch in on what we tried that has not worked so well.

I will start off with a couple.

I realized late this summer (after a very rainy summer) that planting them 4-5 seeds per sq ft is not a good for my area. May not be good for any location unless you are going to spray fungicides regularly.

Most of my 2 & 3 year old patches where I planted them that thick got wiped good by the old leaf melt this year. Other places I planed much thinner - they looked great - no problems there.

So I would say if you don't plan on doing a lot of maintenance type spraying, you better stick to planting them thinly, and perhaps just here and there and not in large beds.

I will also say that I tried planting some places that I had my doubts about (was no wild seng growing there) and most of those locations, they sprouted and 3 leafers looked good but after a couple years they just have not done much - still very small plants after 3 years.

Other areas that I planted that had some wild nearby those have done well.

So going into my 4th fall of planting I would say I have learned a few good lessons.

Any of you other growers with as much or more experience as me willing to fess up and tell us a little about what all you did wrong ?

No doubt some less experienced growers would love to avoid the mistakes we have all made.

Thanks

TNhunter

TN, I'll be glad to chime in.

I've had 20 years of ups and downs, mostly downs.

The first 2 or 3 years I planted thick and everything looked great. I put 20 lbs of seed in the ground. Then there came a rainy season and rot root. It wiped out everything in low areas first and then hit my other places with fairly good drainage,thinning it drastically.

I started rethinking and started looking at better places with good drainage. Even at this it seems to self thin itself. So what I've done in the past 5 or 6 years is look for the north slope with the real rich loose soil that you can almost dig with your hands. I then plant sparingly 10 seeds in a spot 2 feet in diameter and take a step and do another one. This gives plenty of room for the berries later.

I'll never make a lot of money but it's already paid for my seed and then some.

All of the larger patches that I have planted rather densely have all turned out to be pretty much a complete bust. I have had more success planting similar to what Rootman has described in his post above. (Small patches less densely planted). In the last couple of years I have planted them just like I do berries from wild plants - just a shallow trench and bury them about an inch deep. Location is key though. If it doesnt look like an area that I would find wild ginseng growing then I dont bother planting it there.

The other thing I learned was that it is hard to keep the seed from washing down the hill if the grade gets too steep. Anything with a slope going up at more than a 45° angle is probably too steep in my estimation anyways. I know that I regularly find wild sang growing on steep slopes like this, but it seems to be difficult to keep the majority of planted seed in place for six months til they sprout.

I have come to the conclusion that I will never get rich from this, but I truly enjoy it, and have had some limited early successes anyways.

I think that by putting in thinly spaced woodsgrown beds with routine maintenence the first few years of their lives may give plants a better chance of surving til 10-15 years. This is just a thought though as I have not put it to the test.... YET ......

TnHunter,
Man sorry for your loss, I remember about 3 years ago in a thread entitiled $30 stratified seed, I tried to warn you about things to come and i know alot of people here thought i was bs'ing, but i went back and copied and pasted it for ya to review.

Re:Stratified seed - 30.00/lb 3 Years, 1 Month ago
Hi,
Just like to give some more input into this broadcast method..IMO, maybe it would work better if the seeds were wild seeds because the stratified seeds have their husk removed and they must be kept moist at all times or the seed will die, Wild seed have an extra two _layer_s of protection the pulp and the skin, this is what enables the wild seed to just fall off the plant and be exposed for long periods of time before working their way under the leaves into the soil. The stratifed seed are very vunerable and alot of care has to be taken with them to get them to do right, alot of times when you order seed and get them they are already starting to crack open mice love whats inside of the shell, sometimes i have noticed something will nibble on my seed on the plant however very seldom is the entire seed eaten, i think that the pulp and skin of the wild seed in unflavorable to most animals.
On germination rates: i have about up to 80-90% germination rates with most all that i have planted and that is a very good thing because the reality is thats the easiest part of growing ginseng, the hard part is waiting 8-12 years to harvest, the survival rate is the most important, after 10 years of growing expect your survival rate to be about 5% (thats 5% of whatever your germination rate was.) The first season is the easiest you go out to your crop to see 10's to 100's of thousands of young plants and think wow im going to make a fortune, but mother nature has a few surprises for you along the way,,,the soil is full of nemotodes and pathogens that will spell a quick and painful death for a huge percentage of the cultivated seed, those seed were grown in an enviroment that was full of fungicides pesticides and fertilizers and that has weakend the seeds ability to grow in an uncontrolled state. (wild) alot will make it up to about year 3 or 4 then its like they just start dying for a variety of reasons, my 1st year i planted 10 lbs that was in 1999, i had about a 90% germination rate i have less than 500 plants left of the original 50000 or so. Growing wild -simulated ginseng meaning (not cultivating the soil with a tiller, not using fertilizer, not using chemicals is not an easy thing to do.) if it was we would not enjoy such high prices for our efforts. Heres probably the best advice that i can give you...go out into the woods where you want to plant and look around right now and if you see large areas with little green vegetation or large bare areas that look like easy planting dont do it....there is a reason nothing or little is growing there now. look for places that have a good covering of vegetation right now that is your best planting spots...and good luck if you try broadcasting. It didn't work for me. hope this helps

yep what k-duce says is true I have 13 acres of hillside that I can only use around 3 to grow sane on the rest it wont last 2-3 years or grows so small after 10 years I am ashamed to dig and sell it.
They are so many variables to it.Now if I am digging I plant,if it looks like they should be some their but they is none wild I don't bother much. I might plant a few, but I don't put all my eggs in that basket.

Where to start!

The very first thing I learned many years ago was that ginseng doesn't live long in a sunny spot by a big maple tree.

As for the spacing, in my wild sim beds I am spacing maybe 6 to 8 inches. I don't pay attention and just plant when I\"m doing it. I use my seeder and plant in a semi circle in front of me 1-5 seeds per hole (too much time to be more careful than that) and holes 6-8 inches or so apart. Then, I step up maybe 10\" or a foot or so and do it again. All of my wild sim plantings are exceeding my expectations. If I had to guess, my oldest bed being 9 years old now, I have likely about 70-80% survival. It has been naturally reseeding itself for the last few years and there are many seedlings and smaller twos and threes under the big mature three and four prong plants I planted there.

I've had only minimal success with the rake and scatter method. I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong the times I tried it, and if I were to try it again now knowing what I do, the results might be better. But I don't like that method if it can be avoided.

I\"ve learned that replant failure is indeed an issue. However, it seems to be linked to worked ground. I don't know if rake and scatter plots would experience this phenomenon or not, but I know my tilled beds do and the commercial farms certainly do. I\"ve not noticed any replant issues when reseeding over a wild sim spot.

I've learned that when I have an exceptional bed of 2s or 3s, I shouldn't dig them all for sale as I'll kick myself for doing it a few years later! lol

I regret not planting a lot more wild sim early on once I got the hang of growing ginseng. I would be harvesting premium roots right now if I had.

I've learned that straw works in the woods. I've spent a lot of time with a shredder vac sucking up leaves for mulch on the beds only to have them blown clean. When I put on 2-4 inches of clean straw, it stays on the beds and does a better job. However, if its not clean you have a weed problem, and if you get it too thick you get a rodent problem...and you might anyway. Straw is MUCH faster as well. These days, that is a big issue for me. However, it stands out like a sore thumb in the woods the first fall until snowfall.

Also, I agree with 5prong....maintenance (spray and weeding etc) will increase your survival rate the first few years. That seems to be the critical point for ginseng. Once they get past the first July, they are half way there. Once they get to the end of their third year, the odds are they will do just fine there on out. Certainly a few will succumb, but you will start finding plants where you thought there were none also some years.

K_duce has a real good post. Also get your seed 3/4 to an inch in the ground.

One pound of seed will plant a very large area. And it takes a lot of time.

Some good info on this post - the real stuff on what a newbie should expect.

PS - Kduce - good post and just a FYI - the year after Glenn over in Pulaski told me he had that stratified seed for 30.00/lb, I called him to buy some and he had none that year. The seed shortage had started to kick in then so I never actually got any seed that cheap. Never tried the broadcast method either, but I have read some post by Billy where he tried it. I can see what you mean by stratified seed having little chance of making it and a man would probably be better off if he tried the broadcast method to use green seed instead. Also you would have to time it right - broadcasting just before a storm and heavy leaf fall.

Most of my plantings have been with rake and scatter in beds, and I did the 4-5 seeds per sq ft, and now after a good rainy year (first rainy year since I started planting 3 years ago), well I can sure see that planting in beds and planting thickly is not going to work well for my area. Not sure if it would anywhere (without a lot of spraying). I am just not going to do that myself, but others might.

I would say to anyone just starting out that if you are not going to hit the woods and spray your beds several times each spring and summer, that you better plant them a lot thinner than that and you may not want to plant in large beds at all. I have several places on hillsides where I walked and found patches of maidenhair fern and marked them with flagging (in the summer) and then that fall planted those locations, thinly just here and there and have had no problems there. I used my sharpshooter shovel with pvc pipe for seed delivery to plant those places just poking a couple of seeds in the ground here and there. That has worked well and no sign of disease in those areas.

I would say that rake and scatter would be fine too, if you made smaller beds, like maby 5x5 and only dropped something like 1-2 seeds per sq ft.

I would say that it takes around 3 years to really start to see what you have done right and what you have done wrong. And also that you could have 2-3 years of dryer spring/summers and not see much disease, but then have a rainy year like this one and it come alive and hit you hard.

TNhunter

Some good info on this thread. To me the top 2 things to consider when planting wild sim is

#1 location and #2 spacing

Wild ginseng or wild simulated ginseng will not grow just anywhere. To me the most critical thing is to plant where ginseng is likely to grow. This is much easier for folks that have hunted wild ginseng to identify and understand than it is for those who havent hunted it much.
Once such areas are identified then spacing on the plantings becomes important. As others have already discussed, it is easy for disease to spread through densely planted areas.

The last thing I would mention is that I have had zero success planting cultivated rootlets into a wild environment.... perhaps thats just me though..

The last thing I would mention is that I have had zero success planting cultivated rootlets into a wild environment....

I've actually experimented with this and had pretty good luck. When I first started, I bought about 100 3 year olds from a guy and kept them in a shaded bed in my garden for a couple years. Later, I planted them into the woods about 11 years ago. I picked some tops off them earlier this year and checked on some just yesterday.

Also,last fall we planted a few beds of SELECT 1yr rootlets -these are cultivated I grow in raised beds- and the ones that didn't get washed away by the incredible amount of rain are doing very well as of yesterday.