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Spring Vegetable Garden

Planting Seeds in the Garden, the Basics

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Many Southern gardeners will be planting seeds in the garden this weekend. For best success, here are four things to keep in mind.

1. Correct season for growing the crop.

Back of a seed packet includes planting depth, plant spacing, and days-to-harvest information, for use when planting seeds in the garden.
Back of a seed packet includes planting depth, plant spacing, and days-to-harvest information, for use when planting seeds in the garden.

Seed packets for each crop usually include some general planting information. One item to look for is a planting date range. You can use the date range to make sure you plant the seeds in the right season. Check to make sure your seed packets say that it is okay to plant their seeds in the garden this month.

Planting in the right month means that the soil is warm enough for seeds to grow. In addition, the plants will have enough time to mature to make veggies for you to eat.

2. Planting depth for the seeds.

Check the planting depth for each kind of seed. The information should be on the seed packet somewhere; usually, it’s on the back. When seeds are planted too deep, they don’t always manage to push through the soil to get their seed-leaves into the sunlight. If they are too shallow, they may dry out and not  grow.

3. Spacing information, when planting seeds in the garden

Plant spacing information often is on the back of a seed packet, too. The distance-between-plants provided is usually for larger gardens that are planted in rows. Many gardeners now work in smaller, raised-bed gardens, and they plant in a grid-pattern. This intensive planting calls for slightly larger plant distances.

An Earthway seeder like this works well when planting seeds in the garden, for in an in-ground garden. It spaces seeds evenly and at the depth you set -- less strain on your back, too.
An Earthway seeder like this works well when planting seeds in the garden, for in an in-ground garden. It spaces seeds evenly and at the depth you set — less strain on your back, too.

When crops are in farm-style rows, the plants can be closer together within the row.  There is plenty of room for them to spill out into the aisles between rows. In grid-pattern spacing, the aisles are collapsed, so plants are equally distant from all their neighboring plants. In other words — a plant that is 6-inches from the next plant within its row is also 6-inches from the nearest plant in the next row over.

Why should I plant seeds farther apart when using a grid pattern?

When a crop is one that has a big above-ground canopy (lots of branches and leaves), giving the plants a little more room is best. Even just an inch or two more can help. If the plants are very close together, the tops mash together in a crazy tangle, making it harder to harvest the crop.

Also, when leaves and branches from multiple plants tangle together, the leaves dry more slowly after a rain. The longer leaves stay damp, the more likely it is that a fungal spore (they blow in on the wind) will stick to a leaf, take hold, and grow. None of us wants to see our garden plants turn spotted, brown, and/or droopy. We can reduce the risk by making conditions better in the garden; one way to do that is to make sure air can flow easily among all the greenery.

Here is an example of adjusting plant distances for grid spacing using bush beans: Gardeners working in rows plant these just 3-4 inches apart. In my garden, I plant them 6 inches apart in a grid pattern, and still, when the plants are mature the greenery is pretty dense. Finding the beans can be a challenge. My sister in Louisiana plants her bush beans 9 inches apart in a grid pattern. Being further South can mean that the plants grow bigger.

4. Watering your new crops

After planting seeds in the garden, water them often enough that the soil does not dry out. If the seeds dry out before sending out good roots, your crop might not survive. However, the seeds also will not grow well in swampy conditions. Seeds that are kept too wet, for too long, can rot.

We are looking for a “happy medium” of damp soil. There should be enough moisture for the seeds to germinate (open up and send out roots and baby leaves), and the dampness should extend several inches underground.

For the little seedlings to establish good growth, you can water the soil until it is damp down to several inches. We want the roots to reach deeper into the soil, and keeping it moist several inches down will help this. Deeper roots are better protected from ground-surface heat and dryness. Deeper roots also have more soil to pull nutrients from, which can improve plant growth and productivity.

How can you know whether the soil below the surface is damp? After watering the garden, reach your hand down into the soil to feel. This is easier than it sounds. Just poke a trowel straight down into the dirt, then pull back on the handle slightly. This action opens up a wedge of space. Slide your hand down into that wedge of space, and feel the soil. If it is damp, you will know. It the soil is dry, you will know.

The place you poke the trowel into the soil should be far enough away from seeds, seedlings, and plants that it won’t disturb roots of your crops.

Not all crops will be planted as seeds

Gardeners will plant some crops as transplants. Tomatoes and peppers are two in particular that will produce more food if set into the garden as little plants. When set into the garden as plants, they reach maturity early enough to produce vegetables over a long season.  Don’t forget to apply a starter fertilizer  at planting time, if possible, to encourage root growth.

Hope you all have a great day in the garden!

A Tale of Two Fish Emulsion Fertilizers

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Several years ago, I could have suggested to organic gardeners that they use dilute fish-emulsion fertilizer as a “starter”, after setting transplants into the garden. A starter fertilizer is one that is phosphorus-rich.

There would have been very little chance of error, since the only form of fish emulsion I had seen at garden centers had a nutrient balance that would promote root growth: 2-3-1. (A brand with similar nutrient balance to the one pictured below is Indian River Organics Liquid Fish Fertilizer.)

This fish fertilizer is great to dilute for use as a starter fertilizer for transplant in the organic garden.
This fish fertilizer is great to dilute for use as a starter fertilizer for transplants in the organic garden. PHOTO/Amy Whitney

That number sequence, 2-3-1, is a short way of telling how much, as a percentage of the total product, of the three major plant nutrients are in the fertilizer. The numbers are always in the order nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium, also called N-P-K.

All fertilizer labels show the N-P-K of the product. In the example above, 2-3-1, you can see that the middle number, the phosphorus number, is higher than the other two. Using this as a starter fertilizer would be a good plan for many organic gardeners.

Now, though, some garden centers offer another version of fish emulsion fertilizer, made in a way that gives it a very different nutrient balance: 5-1-1. The one in my current “stash” is Alaska Fish Fertilizer. This product has a larger first number, the nitrogen number. Using this on newly planted transplants would be less of a good idea. Nitrogen supports/promotes leafy growth.

This fish emulsion fertilizer has an N-P-K of 5-1-1.
This fish emulsion fertilizer has an N-P-K of 5-1-1. PHOTO/Amy Whitney

If plants start their new lives in the garden with a rush of nitrogen, they might not have a good enough root system, as the summer gets hotter and drier, to keep the large above-ground part supplied with water and nutrients.

The beauty of a starter fertilizer is that it helps get a good root system established before the plants develop a lot of above-ground growth.

Organic gardeners looking for a good starter fertilizer, and thinking about using fish emulsion, should check their product label to verify the nutrient balance. Most of us are going to want to use something similar to the one that shows an N-P-K of 2-3-1 on the label when we set our transplants into the garden.

When would you use the 5-1-1 version of fish fertilizer? I am using it now, on leafy greens that were planted in late winter. I have spinach and kale in the garden, and both of those crops tend to bolt (send up a flower stalk and quit making delicious leaves) when the weather gets warm. That time is coming soon.

To keep the leafy greens tender and tasty for as long into spring as I can, I will be applying the 5-1-1 Alaska product, once every ten-or-so days, as I water those crops.

For organic gardeners who are following veganic practices, a fertilizer that is fairly rich in nitrogen, to keep late winter greens growing as the spring progresses, is Nature’s Source Organic Plant Food 3-1-1. This is a seed-based product, and its odor is a lot milder than that of the fish fertilizers.

Veganic gardeners looking for a pre-mixed starter fertilizer, with more phosphorus, may be out of luck. I haven’t seen one yet, but it is possible to create your own by adding some rock phosphate to one of the seed-meal fertilizers. This is a very concentrated source of phosphorus. Follow instructions on the label to avoid applying too much of the product.

 

 

Is that Seedling a Lettuce, a Spinach, or a Weed?

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Seed leaves of spinach are dark green, long and narrow.
Seed leaves of spinach are dark green, long and narrow. PHOTO/Amy Whitney

If you’ve planted seeds in your garden in a random scattering rather than in rows, it can be difficult to tell which seedlings are your crops and which are weeds.

What makes it harder is that the very first leaves to come through the soil, the seed leaves, do not have the same shape as the mature leaves. Knowing what the “adult” plant looks like does not help us identify the babies.

This is one of the beauties of the row-system of planting — all the seedlings that look alike and are in a row are probably your crop.

Seed leaves of most lettuces are pale green, and almost as wide as they are long.
Seed leaves of most lettuces are pale green, and almost as wide as they are long. PHOTO/Amy Whitney

However, many of us have abandoned tidy rows in an effort to use our smaller — or oddly shaped — gardens more efficiently. This can lead to  confusion when the crops and weeds emerge pretty much at the same time.

New gardeners are not the only ones who can have this problem. I took the pictures for this post while I was in Oklahoma visiting my Mom (aka “Grammy”) and Stepdad (“Grandpa Bill”).

Mom had planted some of her large containers with cool-season crops but wasn’t sure which of the little green leaves were spinach and which were lettuce. She knew which were the peas.

In another week or so, the plants will look more like the crops that they are, as the next sets of leaves grow. For now, knowing which seedlings are actually crops means that the weeds can be removed without fear of wiping out the crop at the same time.

That Seed Starting Time of Year

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Seed Starting Zine contains basic information about how to start seeds indoors to grow transplants for your garden
Zine on Seed Starting for Spring is the right size to bundle with a seed packet as a garden gift. PHOTO/Amygwh

I love the whole seed-starting process. When seed-starting time rolls around each year, regardless of how big or small my garden is going to be in that year, I start some plants indoors from seeds. New gardeners may not be aware that seed-starting is something they can do, too.

You don’t need a greenhouse, but you do need one or two fluorescent lights for your plants, some seeds (of course), seed-starting “soil” or peat-pellets, some kind of container, and the ability to pay a little bit of attention to the wet/dry condition of the seedling starter soil.

Seed Starting Zine open to show pages of the booklet.
Seed Starting Zine open to show pages of the booklet. A Zine made this way from a single sheet of paper has six pages inside. PHOTO/Amygwh

I had been looking into low-cost print options for written information, and my children (ages 26 and 31), who are much cooler than I am, told me that I was talking about creating a Zine.

This may not be the answer to spreading the good news about seed-starting to a lot of new gardeners, but creating a Zine about Seed Starting for Spring was fun, and the folded Zine is just the right size to bundle with a seed packet as a little gift for new gardeners.

The Zine pattern I chose uses a single sheet of paper, folded in a way that creates a six-page booklet. The pages are tiny, so the information is bare-bones, but there is enough to get started with.

Zine made from a single-sheet of paper is unfolded to show the fold-lines and place to cut with scissors.
The fold-and-cut pattern is easy to see on this unfolded Zine.  PHOTO/Amygwh

However, I haven’t figured out how to turn it into a downloadable pdf without my computer/printer adding extra margins around the text. I will figure it out, eventually, but for now, I am adding a different option for my readers to download.

The two-sided document (as a pdf) contains more information than the Zine, but it isn’t nearly as cute. The document is “Seed Starting for the Spring Vegetable Garden”.

You can download the file by “clicking on” the linked title below:

Seed Starting Guide from SmallGardenNews

I hope you find that it is helpful!

A Gift of Miner’s Lettuce

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Miner’s lettuce is a cool season “weed” that grows in some Southern gardens. Like some other weeds that thrive in vegetable gardens, miner’s lettuce is also an edible wild plant.

After I finished my Butterfly presentation yesterday, a local garden-friend who came to the talk gave me some miner’s lettuce that she had dug up from her garden that morning. We both chuckled over the gift of weeds, since I had identified this one for her a couple of years ago.

Miner's lettuce is a cool season edible wild plant
Miner’s lettuce is a cool season edible wild plant. These are the early-growth leaves. PHOTO/Amygwh

The little plants had popped up “out of nowhere”, and every time she dug the plants up, more grew in their place.

The plants my gardening friend brought are showing only their early-growth leaves. These may not be the ones you are most familiar with. In books and on websites, the later, round leaves that have tiny, white flowers in the center are shown more often.

While my friend and I were admiring the tubful of healthy little plants, another gardener walked over to join us. Miner’s lettuce grows in her garden, too. She said that she tosses the leaves into the blender when she makes green smoothies.

I hadn’t heard of that way of serving the succulent little leaves, but the method certainly seems easy and speedy!

My usual source of information about edible wild plants, Euell Gibbon’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus (a classic!), did not provide information about this plant. Luckily, another edible wild plants book on my shelf, How to Prepare Common Wild Foods, by Darcy Williamson, offers plenty of recipes.

One of her recipes is for a wilted salad — the kind that uses hot bacon grease in the dressing. If you already have, in another cookbook, a wilted salad recipe that calls for lettuce, spinach, or a different green, you can substitute miner’s lettuce, if you have it, to make a similar salad. Williamson recipes for miner’s lettuce salads are complete with a “how to” for the dressing intended for each salad. Some of these look very good, and I am hoping to try them if the miner’s lettuce does well in my own yard.

Miner’s lettuce needs a moist, loose soil; it should become abundant if I find the right place for it. Even in an ideal location, miner’s lettuce will disappear for the summer. After the fall, as days begin to lengthen again in early winter, the plants should spring back to life, just like they do in my friend’s garden. I am looking forward to adding another edible wild plant to my yard!

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.

Planning to Grow Spring Salads

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Seed catalogs have been trickling into gardeners’ homes over the past month or so, and they can be very helpful in planning the spring garden. I am using the seed catalogs stacked up at my house to plan what I hope will be some amazing salads.

Descriptions of the numerous varieties of salad greens offered in the seed catalogs are helping to narrow my search for my next new favorite lettuce (for example).

To be honest, I already have a short list of favorite lettuces for spring: ‘Tom Thumb’, ‘Marvel of Four Seasons’, ‘Bronze Arrow’, and ‘Slobolt’. The first three are exceptionally beautiful, with good flavor and texture, and they grow well in my yard. The last in the list, ‘Slobolt’, isn’t delicious, and its leaves are tougher. It works well when sliced into ribbons for tacos and sandwiches, but I think it just isn’t as good as the base of a salad as the others.

The real benefit is that ‘Slobolt’ holds up so much better in a hot Southern spring than the others, resisting the turn to bitterness that many lettuces take as the weather heats up. Of course, there are also those tacos and sandwiches.

I currently am considering the heat-tolerant varieties ‘Jericho’, ‘Dov’, and ‘Olga’ as possible replacements for ‘Slobolt’. However, as I keep reading through the catalogs and checking information online, that list could change. Wish me luck? (Side note: I have a different list of favorite fall lettuces, because those need to stand up to freezing weather instead of to heatwaves.)

Rocket seedlings growing in a container, indoors, under lights.
Seedling of Rocket salad greens growing indoors under lights. PHOTO/Amygwh

The other new salad-green I want seeds for is the rocket that was in all the salads I ate when visiting Italy last summer. A mild, non-spicy rocket in nearly every salad provided a nutty flavor that was just lovely.

I am growing one version now, indoors, from seeds described on the packet as  “Arugula, Wild ‘Rocky‘ Diplotaxis tenuifolia” (rocket), from the seed company Botanical Interests. The little leaves have that strong nuttiness that I am looking for, but they also, at just a couple of inches in height, already are slightly spicy.

Multiple varieties of rocket seeds are listed in multiple catalogs this year, and I plan to try seeds from more than one, to compare, even though technically they should be about the same.

I will not be spending the entire rest of my life in Italy, but it should be possible to recreate here at home, at least partially, one of those salads. Since my local grocery stores do not tend to stock unusual salad greens with specialized flavors and a short shelf-life, I will need to grow that flavor at home.

What special flavor will you be growing this spring?