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Fall Vegetable Garden

Why Did My Radishes Split?

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There are two main reasons for my salad radishes to split apart. Both reasons, though, are related to my not paying enough attention to the crop.

Some background — I planted the first salad radishes, several kinds, in late September, but more seeds have gone into the ground since then. Until now, all the radishes have been whole, unsplit, but a few have been a bit spongy, which means some radishes definitely stayed in the ground too long.

Salad radishes harvested in late December from my Georgia garden.

Of the five radishes in the nearby picture, only one has split, but the split is huge. The texture and flavor of this radish, the fourth from the left, was fine, but the little veggie was hard to clean. Dirt really stuck tight to that white, inner part of the root.

Reason 1: Radishes left in the ground too long

One reason salad radishes split is that they have been left in the ground too long. University of Illinois Extension says this about harvesting radishes:

Pull radishes when they are of usable size (usually starting when roots are less than 1 inch in diameter) and relatively young. Radishes remain in edible condition for only a short time before they become pithy (spongy) and hot. 

Radish, by University of Illinois Extension

Reason 2: Uneven watering

University of Illinois Extension adds this note: “A flush of moisture after a period of relative dryness also may cause mature roots to burst and split. Try to avoid uneven moisture availability.”

I haven’t done any watering this fall/winter. I haven’t needed to, because rain keeps falling and the soil never dries out. In the past week or so, though, the sky has dumped even more enormous quantities of water on north Georgia.

Radishes from my garden harvested on the 17th, just a week before that last batch, were not split. A couple of radishes harvested on the 26th were split. I am thinking that the massive rainfall contributed as much as age to the splitting.

How to have radishes that don’t split

Salad radishes from my north Georgia garden.

You can probably guess the logical solution to the split-radish problem: harvest early and put your garden in a less rainy location. That first part of the solution is reasonable, but it can be impossible to move your garden to a less-rainy location.

It is possible, though, to block some of that rainfall with a row cover. A non-woven row cover will let some rainfall through, but not all of it. If I had been thinking more about my radishes, I would have set up a cover for them, to prevent the excessive rainfall from soaking their planting bed.

My experience

My spring-planted radishes grow faster than my fall-planted radishes. In fall and winter, I think I have oodles of time to harvest those little roots. They stay crisp and sweet much longer in fall than in spring! However, the amount of time they can stay in the ground, even in fall/winter — and still be delicious — is limited.

There is one variety that hasn’t split, in any year, in my garden: ‘French Breakfast’. Maybe its longer, narrower shape protects it from splitting. This variety is a little spicier than some of the round types, but ‘French Breakfast’ is great on an open-face butter sandwich.

Note: If this post is interesting or helpful in anyway, please “like” or “share” it. Thank you!

Winter Harvests at Plant a Row for the Hungry

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The local Plant a Row for the Hungry (PAR) gardeners plan to cut back on their whole-group meetings through much of the winter. That doesn’t mean the gardeners won’t still be providing garden-fresh produce to a local food pantry, but it does mean that they are using the reduced workload of the winter garden to take a break.

Instead of meeting as a whole group every week (the usual schedule), PAR gardeners are signing up in pairs to harvest and deliver greens and root-crops. If the garden seems to need more attention, larger-group workdays can be scheduled, but those will be less frequent. There is no need for watering or continuous weeding, and no more heavy work like spreading mulch, until spring comes back around. 

Fall crops at Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden, well-grown and ready for harvest.
Fall crops at Plant a Row for the Hungry Garden, well-grown and ready for harvest.

Last week’s workday was the last major workday for the season. While some gardeners harvested, weighed, and bagged greens for delivery, others pulled the last of the peppers and eggplants. A freeze was tentatively forecast for the weekend, with a bigger chance of freezing early this week. An early-week freeze looks less likely as the target-dates get closer, but it was good to move those plants out of the garden while there was a small crowd of gardeners to complete the task.

Even better, there was a basket-load of peppers to deliver to the food pantry, in addition to the greens.

Kale and garlic share a bed at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden. Kale can be harvested all winter. Garlic will be harvested in summer.
Kale and garlic share a bed at the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden. Kale can be harvested all winter. Garlic will be harvested in summer.

In the next week or so, the irrigation system will be turned off.  Turning the system off and draining it for the winter will protect the equipment from freeze damage. This is a more complicated task (than pulling up old crops, for example) to prepare the garden for cold weather, but it is important for the success of next spring’s garden.

Trio of gardeners harvesting lettuces and kale from the first planting bed.
Trio of gardeners harvesting lettuces and kale from the first planting bed.

Gardeners who are new to fall/winter gardening in the South may be unsure about how much to harvest each week from the garden. It may help to know the guidelines the PAR gardeners discussed, to guide their harvest of winter crops:

Closer view of one 'Red Russian' kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest.
Closer view of one ‘Red Russian’ kale plant that has plenty of big leaves ready for harvest.
  1. For leafy greens, harvest lowest/outer/larger leaves.
  2. Harvest no more than 1/3 of the mass of any leafy greens plant each week.
  3. Wait for warm-enough temperatures (above 32 degrees F, with no frost on the leaves) to harvest any/all of the crops/
  4. For root crops (beets, daikon radishes, etc), pull the entire plant at harvest, including the leaves. Those are good food, too.
  5. For the broccoli, some leaves can be harvested before the actual head of broccoli is ready to harvest — leaves of broccoli plants taste pretty much like broccoli; harvest sparingly, though, so plants have enough energy to make a good-sized head of broccoli.

Hope that other gardens are doing as well as the PAR garden!

Fall in the Garden, Continued

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When I listed tasks for the fall garden in an earlier blog post, and again in the more recent one on fall tasks for herbs, I totally forgot to mention gathering and saving seeds. For many gardeners, this is such an automatic behavior — like breathing — that it is easy to forget to mention it, but I should have remembered.

A few last seedheads for 'Red Rubin' basil, set aside to dry for collecting the seeds.
A few last seedheads for ‘Red Rubin’ basil, set aside to dry for saving the seeds. 

The last quarterly meeting for the year for Cobb Community Gardens was held near the end of October, and it featured a seed-swap. One person who could not attend sent an enormous bag stuffed full with seedheads from her purple coneflower patch. 

If I hadn’t already saved seeds from my earliest-blooming ‘Red Rubin’ basil, the meeting should have been enough of a reminder. 

If there are still unexploded seedheads in your garden, for plants you’d like to have more of next year (coneflowers, coreopsis, milkweed, basil, horehound, mints, etc.), gathering those seeds now, to dry for several days and then store airtight and in-the-fridge, is a good idea. 

Basil seeds typically don’t shake out easily until the stalks are dry. Removing leaves from the stalks speeds up the drying, and any leaves still in good condition can be used in the kitchen.

If you have tree onions (aka: walking onions, winter onions, top onions) that have dropped bulblets to the ground, these can be separated and replanted, to grow more onions. Mine are from my stepdad, Bill, and he called them winter onions.

These plants make bulblets (or top sets), that look like tiny onions, on a stalk. You can see a cluster of sprouting bulblets in the photo collage below.  Anyone who doesn’t have a free source of these (another gardener) might look into buying a few. They multiplied in my garden pretty quickly, from an original cluster of five bulblets.

One source of bulblets is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, which is a great resource for gardeners in the Southeast.

Elsewhere in my garden, I still have chicory roots to dig up. The roots have not grown as large as I had hoped, so I plan to harvest only half of the plants this year. This would leave the other half to continue growing next year, to make bigger roots for coffee-roasting. I may have to buy some extra chicory this year to stretch my supply.

Collection of photos showing state of the garden in fall: radishes, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and more.
Collection of photos showing state of the garden in fall: radishes, green onions, carrots, cilantro, and more.

Pictures in the photo-collage above are representative, but do not show all the good things growing in my garden. Kale and lettuces also are growing. There would have been beets and spinach, but critters ate those while they were still small.

The radishes you see up above are ‘French breakfast’ salad-type radishes. The winter radishes (not pictured) are bigger. We will be able to use a few in our family gathering that is coming up later this month.

How is your fall garden?

Preparing for the First Frost

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The National Weather Service posted a frost advisory for my area (north Georgia) for last Sunday night. One bit of good news is that the frost did not appear. The other bit of good news is that I know how to prepare my garden for the first frost in fall.

Most of that preparation started many weeks ago, but there are always some last minute things to consider. This is what I did to get ready:

I harvested the largest peppers in response to prepare for the first frost..
Pepper harvest before the projected frost.

The evening before the projected frost, I harvested the largest of the remaining peppers. The peppers are the last of my warm-season crops, along with a little basil still standing out there. The cucumbers are already gone from the garden.

That is pretty much all I did, because most plants in my garden are ready for colder weather. The cool-season crops will do just fine in the early freezes of autumn. Some flowers will look terrible after a frost, but that is the way it goes. Some perennials, including a few herbs (thyme, rosemary, for example), will keep green leaves through the winter, and others will die back — turning brown and crunchy — but grow back from their roots in spring. I don’t worry about any of these.

This is a more complete list of some steps I take most years to get ready for the first frost:

Garden checklist to prepare for the first frost

  1. Harvest remaining warm-season crops that are mature enough to either finish ripening indoors or use “as is” in the kitchen.
  2. Check soil moisture. If the soil is dry, water the garden. Roots in moist soil are better-protected from cold than roots in dry soil. (We have had enough rain recently that soil moisture is plentiful.)
  3. If I had frost-tender plants that I wanted to protect (like a still-healthy tomato plant), to keep them growing another few weeks, I would cover them with row-covers or other fabric. Often, the first frost is followed by a stretch of warmer weather that allows warm-season crops to keep producing, if they survived.
  4. If I hadn’t already done this, I would pinch off any flowers  and flower-buds that were on my warm-season crops (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc), to encourage the plants to put their remaining energy into maturing their existing fruits.
  5. Cool-season crops do not usually need protection (like row-covers) for the first frost, so I don’t cover these. An exception would be if the plants were late going into the garden and, as a result, still just seedlings. Another would be when the frost follows a stretch of very warm days (highs in the 70s, for example), which could leave the plants unprepared to withstand a sudden drop into freezing temperatures. In the South, this happens.
Carrots in the garden can withstand the first frost without being covered for protection.
Garden carrots do not need to be covered through the first frost in Autumn.

Where I live, north of Atlanta, the first frost usually shows up around the first of November, which is soon.

When the first freezes finally arrive, it will be time to remove the last of the summer crops. If you are taking a break from gardening this winter (some people who aren’t me do this), be sure to cover the soil with some kind of mulch. Mulch protects the soil, preventing erosion by rain/wind and helping to maintain its fertility.

Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons ripen near the time of the first frost in my yard.
Ichi Ki Kei Jiro persimmons ripen near the time of the first frost in my yard.

Cucumber Bonanza Nearing its End

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My late-planted home garden cucumbers have been coming into the kitchen for three weeks now. The fridge contains a small pile of them, and I harvested more today, but the cucumber bonanza is nearing its end. The older cucumber leaves have spots/lesions that look like downy mildew; the leaves that still are unspotted and beautifully green droop in the afternoon sun. The droop makes me think that the plants have another disease, in addition to the mildew.

Cucumber plants, wilted in the afternoon sun, but they look fine in the morning and evening, if you ignore the spotted/mildewed older leaves.

There is a bacterial wilt disease for cucumbers that is carried by cucumber beetles. I have checked the plants — leaves, stems, and flowers — very closely, and I have not seen these beetles. I have seen several bumblebees, some brown skipper-type butterflies, a few flea beetles, tiny snails, ants, a tiny native bee, a jumping spider, and one squash beetle on the plants, but those critters are not known to carry the bacterial wilt disease.

 It is possible that cucumber beetles are very good at hiding. When I finally pull up the plants, I will check the stems for the white stringy goo that is a sign of bacterial wilt (as seen on the Missouri Botanical Garden page on bacterial wilt).

Today’s harvest of cucumbers and peppers.

Meanwhile, I have a small basketful of cucumbers in my kitchen. Some of them will be peeled before we eat them, because something else has scraped the outer part of the skins. If I had found cucumber beetles, I would have suspected that they caused the damage. Since I haven’t seen those beetles, and since squash beetle damage looks different (remember the semicircular troughs?), tiny snails are my current top suspects.

It is hard to say whether the cucumber part of my late-summer-garden-experiment is a bust. The harvest seems short (three+ weeks), but we have a lot of cucumbers. The zucchini part is definitely a bust. There is zero chance of getting zucchini from the sad plants in the half-barrel garden. 

Of course, the pepper plants continue to grow and make peppers, unmarred by disease. Some stink bugs have found them and blemished the skins a bit, but the peppers are all still good enough. The late-planted basil will be big enough for pesto soon. Chicory is looking good, too, and so are the carrots and assorted radishes.

I will transplant the rest of my cool-season seedlings into the garden this week. Currently, they are in a flat, where I planted them in late August. The new crops are kale, spinach, beets, cilantro, and lettuce. Those will all provide food for our kitchen in the cooler months ahead.

Coffee Grounds for Gardens

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The season of falling leaves is nearly upon us, which means it might also be the season for collecting used coffee grounds from nearby coffee shops. The grounds combine well with raked-up leaves in a compost pile to create compost for your next-year garden.

Used coffee grounds can also be mixed directly into the garden soil, as a soil amendment, but then the soil-microbes need a few weeks to start breaking those grounds down before anything is planted in the area.

An explanation is in the video below (video – for a change of pace!). If you can’t see the video on this webpage, you can find it here on YouTube.

 

The information from Oregon State University is linked here.

Hoping that all your gardens are growing well!

Many Kinds of Chicory

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My family has been growing and eating chicory for years.

Some of the many kinds

The first variety I grew may have been ‘Italiko rosso’, a loose-leaf type with red leaf-veins running through its dark green leaves. Others have been ‘Pan di zucchero’, a less bitter variety that makes a head like Romaine lettuces, and ‘Catalogna’, an all-green loose-leaf type. Including chicory in our meals turns out to have been good practice for traveling in Italy, because at restaurants we visited, the cooked greens served with the second course of a meal often were chicory, not spinach.

Emptied seed packets for two kinds of chicory.
Bringing home seeds from Italy isn’t allowed, but these two  packets were emptied prior to travel. The packets are 7.5 x 4.5 inches — huge!

Radicchio, a heading-plant that is usually red instead of green, is also a kind of chicory. Endive and escarole are other forms of chicory that are familiar in the U.S.

These are all good to think about right now because they are cool-season crops that we can plant in our fall gardens. In general, the loose-leaf forms mature in 45-55 days, and so do most of the radicchios. Those can be planted in my area (zone 7b, with a first frost around Nov. 1) in a couple of weeks.

The heading type ‘Pan di zucchero’ takes 80 or more days to mature — it should already be coming up in the gardens of anyone nearby who wanted to grow it. Gardeners south of Atlanta, with later frost dates, still have time to get that variety started.

All of the above chicories are grown for their leaves, which are a lot less bitter in fall/winter/spring than in summer.

Chicory in the kitchen

I haven’t served chicory as a pile of cooked greens, Italian-style, at home, even when they haven’t been bitter. I am not a huge fan of cooked greens. Instead, I usually add raw leaves to a salad or  to soups or sauces, where they end up cooked.

If I were going to cook chicory as a “mess of greens”, I would drop them into boiling water, let cook for about half a minute, drain off the water, then finish cooking in fresh water, just like for any other potentially-bitter green (collards, mustards). When we cook greens this way (because Joe does like greens), much of the bitterness goes down the drain with the water that we pour off.

The chicory in my garden right now

This year, I planted seeds for ‘Magdeburg’ chicory, a variety that has a bigger, tastier root for making chicory coffee.

Chicory in the garden that has been nibbled by the wild yard bunnies.

The seeds went into the garden a few weeks before we left town, but the seedlings were not big enough for me to mulch their patch before we left for the summer. When we got back, the patch was a weedy mess. Among the weeds, though, were some chicory plants.

I weeded as carefully as I could but ended up  pulling some chicory plants with the weeds in spite of the care. A few days later, yard-bunnies found the patch and nibbled it nearly to the ground. Wild yard-bunnies can be hard on a garden.

Deciding what to do about wildlife damage is not easy. There are many options for “pest control”, most of which don’t work. In the end, I poked some sticks into the ground near each plant,  thinking that the sticks would be an annoyance for the bunnies.

As the plants regrew, the bunnies returned. Last week, I added a lot more sticks to the bunny-blockade. The more-crowded assemblage of sticks looks strange, but it seems to be working.

If all else fails and the bunnies are undeterred, I may be able to find a patch of wild chicory to use in making coffee. The bright blue flowers are easy to spot. The hard part will be finding a patch in an unpolluted place (not by a road, for example), where I can get permission to harvest the roots.

Chicory flowers are the same here as in Italy.
Chicory flowers in Italy are the same as those that grow wild here. PHOTO/Amygwh

 

Planting Begins for My Fall Garden

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The first seeds in the ground for my fall garden are two kinds of carrots and a winter radish. I also planted one last round of basil, so there will be more pesto in my freezer to use in wintertime meals.

First seeds planted for my fall garden, plus one last summer herb.
First seeds planted for my fall garden, plus one last summer herb. PHOTO/Amygwh

This year’s carrots: ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’

The two varieties, ‘Bolero’ and ‘Short Stuff’, are shorter carrots that will do well in the clay soil of my in-ground garden.

‘Short stuff’ is also recommended as a good choice for container plantings. The fully-mature carrots will be only about 4-inches long, but wide at the top.

‘Bolero’ will be longer, closer to 6-inches at harvest, but slender all the way down.

I amended the soil by adding a nearly-full bucket (5-gallon size) of yard compost to the garden bed before planting. This addition will loosen the soil and improve the odds that the carrots will grow as they should.

The seedlings have not yet come up, but when they do, they will get a dose of the kind of fish emulsion fertilizer that promotes root growth (higher phosphorus than nitrogen).

You may be wondering why I already planted seeds for carrots, in mid-August. The reason is that crops mature more slowly in fall than in spring. If I want to harvest carrots before mid-December, they need to be in the ground, in my garden, now. (For more details, read my book.)

The first winter radishes

‘Watermelon’ winter radish seeds also are in the garden. The current packet says they take 60 days to reach maturity, but older packets from other seed companies have claimed 70-days, which is closer to the speed they grew in my garden. I decided to use 70-days as my working number to determine the planting date, as a result.

Most of the winter radishes will only make good bulbs in fall, in the time of shortening day length. I don’t know why. Some plants are just like that.

That means, though, that this is a crop that can ONLY be had from a fall garden. If anyone in your family loves radishes (a rare thing, I know), plant these soon!

Heat sink surprise

Raised bed planted with beet seedlings and young onions, in mid-August, in Chicago.
Raised bed with beet seedlings and young onions, in mid-August, in Chicago. PHOTO/Amygwh

When I was in Chicago last week, I noticed that many vegetable gardens already contained plenty of cool-season seedlings. Considering how much further north Chicago is from here, it made sense that fall gardening would already be well-underway.

However, when I looked up its hardiness zone, I was surprised. Chicago is in plant hardiness zone 6a, according to the newer USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. The plant hardiness zone where I live, north of Atlanta, is 7b. That difference in hardiness zones, between Chicago and north-metro-Atlanta, is less than I expected.

Most of area around Chicago (all the northern half of Illinois) is in plant hardiness zone 5, according to the USDA map. That seems more reasonable than 6a. Chicago, which is a large city containing a lot of concrete, must be the same kind of heat-sink that Atlanta is (most of Atlanta is in zone 8a). That could account for part of the difference. Lake Michigan could account for the rest, since enormous bodies of water also help keep nearby air temperatures more moderate.

Update on the ‘Astia’ zucchini

Flower buds forming on young 'Astia' zucchini plant.
Flower bud on young ‘Astia’ zucchini plant, in the “v” between two stems (main stem and leaf petiole). 

The ‘Astia’ zucchini that is growing in my half-barrel planter is still alive. There are no signs yet of leaf-mildew-diseases, which is good news. The other good news is that, even though the seedlings have only been up for a couple of weeks, I can see the buds of flowers forming on the plants.

These flower buds will keep growing, until the flower buds open. Some flowers will be “girls”, which are the ones that make the zucchini that we eat. Some flowers will be ‘boys’. After the boys have done their job of pollinating the girls, I plan to harvest those boy flowers to use in cooking.

While in Italy over the summer, Joe and I enjoyed fried squash blossoms at the Sax Wine Bar in Montepulciano. We are going to make those ourselves, since the good ladies at Sax Wine Bar are in Italy and we are not.

 

Do You Have Your Fall Garden Seeds Yet?

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If you don’t already have the seeds you need to plant a fall veggie garden, and you live near me (one county north of Atlanta), it would be a good idea to go find them soon. I was checking my own planting calendar, and any crop with a days-to-maturity of 70-80 days needs to be planted within the next week or so.

A lot of fall crops will mature in less time, so they don’t need to planted quite so soon. Also, if you are planning to buy plants, you have oodles of time. Fall vegetable plants won’t show up in garden centers for a few more weeks. When they do, that is the time to purchase and set them into the garden, providing a bit of shade to ease the transplants into their new lives in the ground.

Seedlings of 'Astia' zucchini for containers, coming up in my half-barrel planter.
Seedlings of ‘Astia’ zucchini for containers, coming up in my half-barrel planter. PHOTO/Amygwh

There’s still time for a late planting of some summer crops

If you have not yet had enough summer vegetables, bush beans are a crop that matures quickly. Bush bean seeds planted now, in metro-Atlanta, will yield plenty of delicious beans before the first frost.

Last year, I planted bush beans in early August, and I was very glad that I did.

This year when I got back from Italy, I planted a few seeds of a different warm season crop that is supposed to mature quickly. The crop is a kind of zucchini, ‘Astia’ (from Renee’s Garden), bred for growing in containers. The little plants are supposed to produce harvest-sized veggies in about 50 days. Harvest-size for ‘Astia’ is smaller than for most zucchini, but that is ok.

In the past, when I have planted a second crop  of zucchini, they have avoided being attacked by the squash bugs and squash vine borers. Sadly, a mildew-fungus killed the plants before the veggies were big enough to harvest. I have never planted zucchini this late, though, so I am curious how the experiment will turn out. You will be among the first to know!

Presentations and workshops

In other news, I gave a Fall Garden Planning presentation at a local community garden (Hyde Farm) on Saturday, and the gardeners there were awesome! It is great to know more people who value good food and want to grow some of their own.

Garden spider (Argiope) has caught something big for dinner!
Garden spider (Argiope), has caught something big for dinner! PHOTO/Amygwh

On Saturday, August 25th, at 7 (note new time!!!) 3 pm, I will be giving a similar presentation at TruPrep. One great thing about this particular store is that it stocks seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  Also, unlike many garden centers that are associated with home improvement stores, TruPrep is likely to still have plenty of seeds in the store. If you need seeds and are in the neighborhood, check there.

Other upcoming events for me include a Pollinator Symposium in Conyers, GA, at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, on September 22. Monarchs Across Georgia, a group I volunteer for, is putting on the Symposium. I am scheduled to talk about pesticides (imidacloprid in particular) in half of an hour-long afternoon session that I am sharing with a person who will talk about growing milkweeds from seed.

Hoping that all your gardens are growing well!

 

-Amy

Seeds for the Whole Gardening Year

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As we all plan our upcoming year’s gardens,  remembering any problems from last year that could be fixed by growing a different variety of seeds can be helpful.

Example 1: Did you plant a ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’ tomato that grew so vigorously that it spilled across ten feet of garden space AFTER erupting out the top of a 6-foot tall tomato cage? If your garden is too small to comfortably accommodate that growth, you might want to select a variety this year that stays a little more in-bounds. Read the height/length information carefully. The word “vigorous”, when used to describe a plant’s growth, can be a sign that the plant could outgrow a small garden.

Example 2: Did your basil plants suffer from basil downy mildew in last year’s wet spring? According to a 2010 article in HortScience (HortScience September 2010 vol. 45 no. 9 1416-1419), this disease was first identified in Florida in 2007 and has since spread across much of the US, and all sweet basils can be affected to some degree.

A Cornell University webpage, updated in 2017, lists basil types that are less likely to be affected by the disease: “…red types (including ‘Red Leaf’ and ‘Red Rubin’), Thai basil (‘Queenette’), lemon basil (‘Lemon’, ‘Lemon Mrs. Burns’, ‘Sweet Dani Lemon Basil’), lime basil (‘Lime’), and spice types (‘Spice’, ‘Blue Spice’, ‘Blue Spice Fil’, ‘Cinnamon’)”.

If downy mildew spoiled your pesto-dreams last year, you might try switching to a resistant variety, even though the flavor will be a bit different.

Basil seedlings in little green pots
Tray of sweet basil seedlings  PHOTO/Amygwh

My own garden has not yet been affected by basil downy mildew (that also can affect coleus and salvia), but I have seen it in other gardens nearby. I know it is in the area, so I like to be prepared. At least one of the basils that I grow this year will be from the list of resistant varieties!

When I have finalized the list of what I hope to grow this year, I will include the entire year, right through fall.

Some garden centers remove their seed-display racks before mid-summer, and catalog sources can have limited supplies of popular seed varieties. Any gardener who waits until summer to buy seeds for the fall garden could be out of luck.

More garden centers do keep their seed racks up longer than when I first started gardening, but I know that when I buy seeds sooner, like now, I can store the seed packets in sealed containers in the fridge soon after they arrive on my front porch.

Some seeds, when stored cool and dry, can be good for growing for several years. This is a real advantage to buying, or ordering, seeds for the whole year in late winter or early spring.