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Spring Vegetable Garden

Planting in the Winter Garden

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Years and years ago, I figured out that sowing larkspur seeds outdoors in February or early March gave me more and hardier flowers than when I planted them in April. Other spring-blooming annual flowers respond the same way to early-planting in the garden. I have found that some herbs and cool-season veggies do well when planted early, too.

It may seem wrong to set out seeds when the odds of freezing weather are still so high. However, the early-planted seeds tend to delay their sprouting until the deepest cold has passed.

Seeds for winter planting

Cool-weather herbs

The herb I am most likely to strew across a couple of square feet of prepared garden bed in February is dill. I grow one of the shorter, leafy varieties of dill. Another herb to try in a winter planting, for anyone who forgot to plant it in September, is cilantro.

My fall-planted cilantro is nicely established, but if I had forgotten to start it in the garden back in September, I would be putting seeds in the garden now. Many gardeners learn the hard way (sad experience…) that cilantro grows best in cool weather.

Another herb to seed into the garden now is parsley. Seeds for parsley can take two or three weeks to sprout indoors, which is the method I usually use to get more parsley, but I have had good success in the past setting parsley seeds directly into prepared garden soil early.

Parsley has a taproot, which makes it tricky to transplant without causing damage to the root. If you have had trouble growing parsley in the past, when set into the garden as transplants, you might be happier with direct-seeded parsley.

  • Winter-planted dill in early April
  • Winter-planted dill in early May

Vegetables for winter planting

Week-old rocket (arugula) seedlings growing in a half-barrel planter.
Rocket (arugula) seedlings, from seeds planted the first week in February.

Cool-season greens are ideal to set out early as seeds in a prepared garden bed. I have already planted seeds for spinach, which may be the most cold-hardy of greens, and more rocket.

Leaf-chicories and lettuces are also good choices. Beets are a good choice, too. Pretty much every vegetable that can stand up to a hard frost will work.

Other seeds that I plant early in the garden are peas; English peas and Sugar Snap types can sprout and grow in the garden when planted in February. Before planting these, I usually wait until I see flowers on the trout lilies in my backyard.

Winter planted peas have plenty of flowers and a few mature peas at the end of April.
Pea patch in April from seeds planted in the garden in February.

The flowering of the trout lilies, which are native plants in Georgia, is a signal that the soil is warm enough that the peas will sprout, and they won’t rot in the cold, wet ground. My trout lilies usually send up flowers in the last week of February, but I noticed yesterday that many leaves in the trout lily patch are already up. The flowering may be early this year.

Winter seeds in containers outdoors, following WinterSown guidelines

There is a method called WinterSown, that calls for seeds to be strewn in containers rather than the garden. You can plant this way, too, but then the little plants need to be removed from the containers and transplanted into either a larger container or into the garden.

If you have never tried the method, you should, because it is fun. However, I am in the Southeastern U.S., which has fairly moderate winters, so I skip the protective containers and go straight to the garden.

How to plant seeds in the winter garden

Prepare the soil

Check the general guidelines in my Good Garden Soil article  if your garden is new. Otherwise, remove weeds, amend the planting area with compost, and mix in your organic fertilizer.

Soil texture — how fine or chunky the soil particles are — affects seed sprouting. Chunkier soils (like most clays) allow small seeds to slip down into cracks in the soil, so deep that they can’t break through to the surface. Texture is improved by a thick addition of compost. Try to add a layer of compost that is at least two inches thick, to mix into the top layer of the garden.

Soil fertility is important, too. That is why mixing organic fertilizer into the top several inches of soil is recommended, even after adding compost.

Setting in the seeds

Garden design and the characteristics of the mature plants both influence how I place the seeds.

For a crop like parsley that will be in the garden for a long time, I drop a pinch of seeds into a slight depression (fingerprint-size) in the soil in the exact spot where I want a plant to grow. Then, I sprinkle a little soil over the spot and press the area to firm the seeds into the ground before lightly watering.

For a crop like a short, leafy variety of dill that will be in the garden only a few months, I strew seeds more loosely across the small planting area that I have prepared. Then, I press those onto the soil before lightly watering. Pressing the seeds to the soil cuts back on the odds they will wash away in the next rain.

“Strewing” should take into account the final spacing. If you strew too many seeds, there will be some thinning to do. Keep in mind the recommended spacing for mature plants as you watch the seeds fall onto the soil. If you have tiny seeds, mixing them with some dry sand makes the strewing easier. This is the method I intend to use for a mixed flower/herb area this year.

For larger seeds like for beets, that need to be planted more deeply, I plant into individual little depressions. The depressions are made by poking a finger about a half-inch into the soil. Since I want my beets to grow about four inches apart, I poke the holes about four inches apart, drop a seed into each hole, push the top closed, press down on the whole area to firm the soil, then lightly water.

If your garden is larger, and the mere thought of crouching in the cold, damp garden to poke a hundred or so planting holes makes you miserable, you might consider borrowing or buying a seeder. When my garden was larger than it is now, my Earthway Garden Seeder made speedy work of putting seeds into the ground at the right spacing and depth.

Transplanting cool-season crops in February

When I told someone last week that I already had transplanted lettuce and radicchio seedlings into the garden, I was asked, “but what if they die in a hard freeze?”

My response: “I have more seeds.”

Raddichio and lettuce transplanted into the winter garden
Raddichio and lettuce transplanted into the winter garden

Actually, most winters, setting in little plants this early would be riskier. So far, though, we have not had a drop down below 20 degrees F. The ground in shadier parts of the yard is cold, but the soil in the space I prepared for these seedlings was only cool.

In addition, I took the precaution of setting up one of those little folding fences around the area and wrapped the fence with plastic, to make it easier to cover the space if very cold weather arrived.

Both of these crops are cold-hardy, and last week was warm. The plants had a solid six days in warm weather to settle in. They will be fine.

The last consideration for these plants is nutrients. Leafy green vegetables are most delicious when they grow quickly, which means they will benefit from some extra fertilizer. This patch (and the rocket and the spinach) will be getting some additional nitrogen in the form of a fish fertilizer, to encourage that speedier growth.

Seeds for the Small Space Garden, part 2

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When choosing vegetable varieties for a small space garden, identifying varieties that will live, in your garden’s soil and local climate, to produce good food, is essential. You can read Part 1, the previous post, to learn one way to find reliable crop varieties to grow. This post, Part 2, offers another, less formal way.

Simple project that identified reliable heirloom varieties for my area

A couple of years ago, a friend — Electa — and I discovered that, between us, we had

Baker Creek's 2017 Whole Seed Catalog includes many hundreds of heirloom seed varieties.

grown more than 300 vegetable varieties, in Georgia, listed in Baker Creek’s 2017 Whole Seed Catalog. This wasn’t a truly random discovery. We were going through the vegetable section of the catalog together, page by page, noting which varieties we had grown and how those varieties did in our gardens, as part of another project.

How does this help you? We created a list, with some notes, of all the Baker Creek varieties either Electa or I had grown (or tried to grow). If your garden is in the Southeastern U.S., planting zone 7b or 8, then plants that did well for us may be ones you want to try.

If you live in a very different climate/soil zone, you might want to try creating a similar list with gardening friends near you.

A short version of the list is included below (keep reading, it’s down there). 

Notes on the White Tomatoes page indicate that two did well in Electa's garden.

Heirloom varieties may be desirable, but disease resistance is unknown

Many organic gardeners are drawn to heirloom varieties of vegetable crops. These varieties have been saved by individuals and families, because of flavor (usually) or because they freeze well, or are good for canning or for drying, or because they are an essential ingredient in a beloved recipe. Heirloom varieties provide the base for a lot of good food. However, there is a downside to heirloom varieties.

Varieties that were developed in university research programs usually have been tested for disease resistance. Heirloom varieties haven’t.

To find out which varieties will grow and produce well, gardeners either have to rely on trial-and-error in their own gardens, or they need to talk with other local gardeners to find out which varieties have done well in gardens nearby. 

Heirloom vegetable varieties in our list

As you probably know, Baker Creek specializes in heirloom and open-pollinated varieties. These do not come with lab-verified disease resistance, but some of the varieties offered in the 2017 Whole Seed Catalog have done great for us, here in the humid Southeastern U.S., where plant diseases can destroy a garden. Other varieties died within weeks, before much — if any — food could be harvested.

Not all of the varieties Electa and I have grown are appropriate for small space gardens. Most winter squashes and pumpkins, for example, are vining plants that can grow 20-30 feet, smothering the nearby lawn and the rest of the garden if care is not taken to re-direct the growing vine-tips back into their own space. Some okra varieties grow to be 8-or-more feet tall.

A short version of the list that Electa and I created, after going through the catalog and marking all the varieties we had tried, is below. 

Our heirloom varieties report for North Georgia

We had more to say about some crops than others. This is our experience with the listed cucumber varieties we had tried:

Notes about which cucumber varieties do best in our Georgia gardens, including notes on flavor.

If you want to see the full list, all 13 pages, you can download Electa and Amy’s list of vegetable varieties from the 2017 Baker Creek Whole Seed catalog, with notes about productivity (including scientific terms like “recommended”, “iffy”, and “no”) and about flavor, with regard to how they did in our gardens.

Our favorites from the list, for most vegetables, are included below:

  • BEANS – Rattlesnake Pole, Mountaineer Half Runner, Jackson Wonder bush lima
  • BEETS – Bull’s Blood (but harvest early), Detroit Dark Red
  • BROCCOLI – Goliath, Waltham
  • CABBAGE – Golden Acre
  • CAULIFLOWER – Purple of Sicily
  • CARROTS – Oxheart, Danvers 126 Half Long, Little Finger, Nantes Scarlet, Parisienne
  • CORN – Glass Gem (because it is so beautiful), Dakota Black Popcorn
  • COWPEAS – Purple Hull Pinkeye, Pigott Family (needs a trellis)
  • CUCUMBER – Beit Alpha, Marketmore 76, Straight Eight
  • EGGPLANT – Aswad, Casper (especially for container growing), Black Beauty (gets seedy, so harvest early), Ukrainian Beauty, Rosa Bianca
  • ENDIVE AND ESCAROLE – Batavian Full Heart, De Louviers
  • SOLANUM BERRIES – Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherries (same family as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, which can make crop rotation difficult)
  • ORIENTAL GREENS AND CABBAGE – Tatsoi (unusual flavor, but grew well)
  • SALAD GREENS – Corn Salad-Dutch and Corn Salad-Mache (both need cool weather to do well, and harvests are tiny – but tasty)
  • KALE AND COLLARDS – all are fine, Tronchuda gets huge (hilariously so)
  • LEEK – Giant Musselburgh (start in spring and allow a full year until harvest)
  • LETTUCE – Bronze Beauty, Buttercrunch, Henderson’s Black Seeded Simpson, Merveille des Quatre Saisons (Marvel of Four Seasons), Mignonette Bronze, Oak Leaf
  • MELON – Schoon’s Hardshell
  • OKRA – Louisiana 16″ Long Pod
  • ONION – all bulb-type onions must be Short Day type for Southern gardens
  • PARSNIP – Hollow Crown
  • GARDEN PEAS – Lincoln, Little Marvel, Wando
  • SNOW AND SNAP PEAS – all are fine
  • HOT PEPPERS – Leytschauer Paprika, Lightning Mix
  • SWEET PEPPERS – Banana, Chocolate Beauty, Lilac Bell, Quadrato d’Asti Giallo, Sheepnose Pimento
  • RADICCHIO & CHICORY – Italika Rosso Dandelion
  • RADISH – Chinese Red Meat, German Giant, Long Scarlet, Purple Plum
  • RUTABAGAS – American Purple Top
  • SPINACH – Bloomsdale Longstanding
  • SUMMER SQUASH – Yellow Crookneck, Zucchini Rampicante (vigorous, very long vines, productive)
  • SQUASH AND PUMPKINS – Big Max, Candy Roaster, Long Island Cheese, Seminole, Sucrine du Berry (all of these varieties grow to be crazy long vines)
  • SWISS CHARD – Perpetual Spinach
  • TOMATOES – Kellogg Breakfast (good flavor, but not a big producer), Arkansas Traveler, Black Krim, Rutgers, Great White, Yellow Pear
  • WATERMELON – Ali Baba, Crimson Sweet, Golden Honey, Sugar Baby

These are not the only varieties we grow

Collectively, Electa and I have more than 60 years of gardening experience in Georgia (we have both gardened in other states, too), so the “more than 300 varieties” should not have been a surprise. What really made us laugh was when we noticed that some of our favorites were missing from Baker Creek’s very large catalog, and we realized how many more than just 300 varieties we have tried.

Here is an example: when we finished the radish pages, Electa asked “Where are the Daikons?” She loves Daikon radishes, but there weren’t any in the 2017 catalog. My own favorite pole beans, ‘Blue Marbut’, I have seen only at Sand Hill Preservation Center, which is also the only source for ‘Straight Nine’ cucumbers.

The “more than 300 varieties” listed in Baker Creeks 2017 Whole Seed Catalog that we have grown were not all purchased through Baker Creek, but the names were the same, so we have counted them as being the same for this list.

Which heirloom varieties are in your tried-and-true list?

Ordering Seeds for the Small Space Garden

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This is a favorite time of year for many gardeners. We pull together our seed catalogs, the notes we made about our gardens during the past year, and our dreams, and we start making lists.

Then, most of us order too many seeds. If you are in this group, know that you have plenty of company.

Some Seed Companies to Try

Items needed in determining what seeds to order for the coming garden: catalogs, leftover seeds, and planning notes
Seeds left from last year, a couple of seed catalogs, an order form, and notes about which seeds to buy for this year.

One seed company that I plan to order from this year has an online catalog only — not a print catalog. That company is Sand Hill Preservation Center. Strictly Medicinal Seeds and Nichols Garden Nursery have not yet sent out print catalogs, but they will arrive, eventually.

I also plan to order a Park Seed exclusive variety (Park’s Whopper tomato) from that seed company, and I have already sent in an order to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

Gardeners in the Southeastern U.S. might also look at Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, that specializes in seeds for the mid-Atlantic states. Most of their seeds will do well across the whole Southeast.

A friend is looking for more container-sized varieties of veggies to grow, and I have suggested that she look at Renee’s Garden Seeds. That company seems to have a lot of miniature-sized crop varieties.

Consider plant size at maturity, disease resistance, heat tolerance

Most of the cool-season veggies that will go into the early spring garden are smaller plants — lettuces, beets, carrots, and spinach, for example. For those, size at maturity is less of an issue, and they will mostly do well even in the Southern U.S.

It would be good, though, to check the days-to-maturity. If a cool-season veggie variety matures in 100 days, the poor plants will end up trying to mature in May or June, when it is no longer cool here. Look for cool-season varieties that mature in much less time, more like 50-70 days, to give them a fighting chance in our short spring.

If you have a small space garden in the Southern U.S., and you are hoping for summer veggies, then you have a double problem. Many of the summertime veggie plants are large. The smaller garden needs right-sized plants that produce well AND that can stand up to all the heat/humidity/diseases that the summer will bring.

When you are looking at mini-sized versions of normally-large veggie-plants, look for information about hardiness and disease resistance. If the description says that the plant stands up well to the harsh conditions of England, you might want to look for another variety. The kind of harsh that is in England is cool/cloudy/wet, not the hot/humid/wet of the Southern U.S.

For the truly determined, it can be possible, with planning, to grow a normally large plant in a smaller space. If you decide to grow gourds, for example, you might “trellis” them up over the top of a shed to keep them from sprawling across the yard.

Switching to a smaller variety – an example from my garden

My garden used to be larger. It has been made smaller in the past few years due to a life change within my family. Change come to all gardens and all gardeners, and change isn’t all bad, but I have had to make adjustments in my gardening. Here is one change that I made this year:

In my order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, I included a smaller cowpea than I have grown in the past. My most favorite cowpea on the planet (so far, of the dozen or so I have tried) is Pigott Family Heirloom Cowpea. However, that isn’t really a small space garden plant. The vines reach more that six feet.

The cowpea I chose from Baker Creek — Old Timer or Purple Hull Speckled — is indeed speckled in the photo, like Pigott Family is speckled, so I am hoping that it has similar flavor.

Saving Money When Ordering Seeds

Seeds can get expensive. Choosing reliable varieties reduces the odds of a total garden failure, and a waste of seeds, even when the weather gets weird.

Choose reliable varieties

For new gardeners, choosing reliable varieties can mean checking with your local Cooperative Extension office to get a good list. In Georgia, the list comes from UGA, and it is full of vegetable varieties that have done well in test gardens across the whole state. You can find Georgia’s list of reliable vegetable varieties at this link.

The planting dates included on that list are for middle-Georgia (Macon-ish), so those dates have to be adjusted if you live north or south of Macon. However, the varieties, some of which are heirloom varieties, are “tried and true”.

New gardeners may also want to check out my information on planting seeds in the garden, to improve the odds that the planted seeds will grow.

(For more about choosing heirloom varieties, see the next post – Seeds for the Small Space Garden Part 2.)

Pool seed orders with a friend, splitting shipping costs

One of my friends and I often place our seed orders together. Then, we split the shipping fee, so each of us only pays half the shipping cost.

When I send in a Baker Creek order, for example, her seeds go onto my order. This year, Baker Creek is sending out seeds without a shipping fee for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. We pooled our order anyway, even though it won’t save us money. We like Baker Creek, and asking them to send out one pile of seeds instead of two might reduce their costs by a tiny bit.

Also, this sharing by pooling our orders and splitting shipping fees (for other seed companies), is a long-standing tradition for us. Over the years, dividing shipping fees has saved us both a little. A similar practice might keep your costs down, too, and it is good to spend time discussing seeds and plants with other gardeners. The conversation is a bonus!

I did get some advice about this practice, though, from Louis in Customer Care at Baker Creek. He said that when seed orders are pooled, the person who placed the order will get a seed catalog the following year, but the other person will need to remember to request a catalog. Just keep that in mind.

Share a seed packet with a gardening friend

When we both have wanted to grow the same variety, my gardening friend and I have shared seeds from one packet. Only one of us ends up with the information on the original packet, but that has not been a problem. We know how to write the important parts (kind of veggie, variety name, source, year) on little envelopes.

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?