Plant your cool-season vegetables now
We generally experience our last average killing frost about March 15. However, our weather has been relatively mild these past years so frost hasn’t been much of a problem. But I do recall a killing frost many years ago in early April.
I can hear many of you crying: “It’s too early to plant cool-season vegetables we were planting later. Don’t do that!”
Here is the trouble: On the back of all cool-season vegetable seed packets it tells you to plant four to six weeks before the last frost. That time is now. Here’s why.
Planting now and into early March, these vegetables mature in April and May while it’s cool. You want it cool when they are maturing. Within these plants sugars build and that means crisp lettuce, snappy carrots and crunchy radishes. Delayed plantings result in the burning up of sugars, leaving you with burned out veggies.
Note what to plant: radishes, carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, chard, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, potatoes, peas and more.
Soils are tricky. They are high in salts and alkalinity and void of organic matter. Adding organic matter works magic on our soils. It opens them up, provides nutrients, creates drainage, regulates the temperatures and conserves water.
“Soils are so vital to having a great garden,” said Sal Ramirez of ViraGrow, an expert with desert soils.
He suggests the following to improve your soil:
1. Spread organic matter 5 to 6 inches deep over the garden area. Here are some examples of organic matter to use:
■ Planting mixes sold by nurseries are composted products with nutrients added.
■ Bio-solids such as Grow Mulch are also good sources.
■ Two-year-old animal manure. Avoid raw manures as they are loaded with salts.
■ And ViraGrow, the compost Ramirez sells.
“It is an amendment with organic nutrients, consisting of compost, sand, bio-solids, wood, green organics, kelp, seaweed, and humic acid and small amounts of steer manure to increase the microbial action within the thoroughly mixed compost,” Ramirez says.
I use this in my raised beds without mixing in any native soil.
2. Add in soil sulfur to help free up nutrients for plant use.
3. Till these products into the soil to at least 8 inches deep.
4. Irrigate to flush away any salts before planting.
With the trend for using organic fertilizers, Ramirez said customers can find blood meal, bone meal, kelp, seaweed, oyster shells, bird guano, animal manures, feather meal and bio-solids readily available.
There is a difference between organic fertilizers and chemical fertilizers – it’s the time it takes to release nutrients to plants. Chemical fertilizers release quickly while organic fertilizers must go through a conversion process before plants can use it.
As a rule of thumb, Ramirez recommends applying organic fertilizers at planting time and halfway through the season.
Planting seeds: Vegetable seeds are available from mail order catalogs, online or in nurseries. By ordering from seed companies, you expand your choices. There are plenty of colorful vegetables such as yellow or purple carrots, purple Brussels sprouts, red and white beets and more to select from.
It’s surprising, but some people never realize vegetables come from the earth. They see inch-long peeled carrots in bags, never connecting them to the garden.
Encourage your children to take part in gardening. Let them plant seeds, nurture them and harvest them. You’ll find they’ll eat vegetables they normally won’t eat after they’ve grown their own.
Cindy Dixon of the Springs Preserve offers an easy way to plant so you won’t have to thin the vegetables.
Using a half-inch pipe, she makes a furrow by pressing into the soil to the depth suggested on the seed packet. She then lays toilet paper along the furrow so it’s easy to see where she drops her seeds at the proper spacings.
She covers the seeds with soil and firms it around them. She keeps the bed moist until seeds emerge.
Finally, mulch the garden area. Mulch conserves water, controls weeds, provides nutrients to your plants and cools the area around the vegetables. Next fall, you work the decomposed mulch back into the soil.
ORGANIC VEGETABLE GARDENING
Dixon and I will guide you through organic gardening basics so you’ll succeed, at 8:30 a.m. Saturday and Feb. 10 at the Springs Preserve, 333 S. Valley View Blvd. Call 822-7700 to reserve your seat.
Linn Mills’ garden column appears Sundays. You can reached him at linnmillslv@gmail.com or call him
at 526-1495.