January 2020 – Perkins Park

Select Seeds Suited for Indoor Sowing and Transplanting

Many crops start well indoors–and need the extra growing time in a protected space while the weather is still too cold–but a few grow better when sown directly in the garden. There aren’t any no-break rules here. Even carrots can be transplanted, though it’s not generally recommended. Especially if you are trying a crop for the first time, read the seed packet for instructions on which method typically works best. Pay attention, too, to the days to maturity information and your crop’s cold tolerance to help decide where and when to sow.

Start with Good Materials

Many seeds are viable for more than one year, but members of the onion family are notoriously short-lived. Pictured here, I sowed the far corner with fresh onion seeds and the near corner with seeds only 1 year-old. Barely any of the old seeds germinated.

Clean your seed-starting containers with a 1:9 bleach:water solution or soapy water.
Use a sterile grow medium formulated for seed-starting.
For best results, use fresh seeds. (See this link to a chart on seed viability and a great discussion on the difference between viability and vigor. More info here.)

Water Wisely

Keep your planting medium evenly moist until your seeds sprout, then let it dry out slightly between watering. In no instance should it be soggy or bone dry. Be gentle if you water on top and use a mister or similar method. Bottom watering avoids the problem of dislodging seeds and young transplants and helps prevent diseases.

Get the Light Right

This one is Margaret Roach’s most emphasized tip. Seedlings will need supplemental lighting–more than they’ll likely get on your windowsill–or they’ll grow tall and spindly.

For Perkins Park Gardeners: What to do if you don’t have a fancy grow light set up and still want to sow your own seeds for transplanting?

- Try inexpensive shop lights. I’ve had reasonable success growing seedlings with a couple of shop lights purchased for around $15 at Ocean State.
- Squeeze one or two cell packs on your windowsill and supplement with a simple clamp light fixture (bulb separate). Set them outside on warm-enough days, taking care to harden them off (see next tip) along the way.
  Lettuce seedlings grown on a windowsill get a little long and floppy, but do all right if you don’t have to hold them long indoors.
  
  But seedlings quickly dry out and outgrow their small egg carton confines.
  
  Here’s another windowsill setup, fashioned out of a recycled cell pack and a milk carton, that gives seedling roots more room to grow.

Take Time to Transplant with Care

Harden off plants before you transplant them to their final space in the garden. They’ll need to gradually acclimate to outdoor conditions, especially to the sun. Start with no more than 1 hour outside in direct sun on the first day (not midday) and gradually increase the time of outdoor exposure over the course of about a week. You’ll know you’ve overdone it if you see bleached or brown and crispy patches on your plants’ leaves. Alternatively, some people like to choose overcast days, leaving them outside during daytime hours for a few days.

Once you’ve gotten your plants hardened off, make sure you’re not rushing to get your plant in the garden too early, before you are reasonably clear of of unsuitable weather.

For more seed-starting tips (and more):

A Way to Garden by Margaret Roach (2019).

For a wide range of seed-starting information, see Margaret Roach’s website.

What are the first crops that we should consider planting in our gardens in the spring? When the soil can be worked, we have a wide range of cold-hardy choices to consider. These crops all have a few things in common. They:

germinate in cold soil
grow well under cool conditions, and
tolerate a light frost.

Many of these crops can and should be planted in cool conditions, else you risk poor germination, poor development, and inferior flavor and/or texture. You’ll want to get them in the ground as early as you can to allow them time to develop before the heat of summer sets in. With good planning and a little cooperation from the weather, you’ll be able to harvest these crops in time to follow up with a warm weather crops such as beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Pay attention to the days to maturity information listed on many seed packets, and look for quick-growing varieties to make the most of your growing season. Also, be prepared to cover your crops with frost protection if temperatures take an abrupt and extreme downturn. Or stagger your plantings with the anticipation of a few losses.

alyssum
arugula
beets*
broccoli
Brussels sprouts
cabbage, including Chinese cabbage
carrots*
cauliflower
celery
cilantro
collard greens
fava beans
hardy perennial herbs, such as chives, thyme, mint, oregano, and sage
kale
kohlrabi
leeks
lettuce
onions*
pak choi
pansies
parsley
parsnip
peas
radish
rutabaga
Swiss chard
tatsoi
turnips

img_20190608_094507449_hdr — Cilantro (foreground) often reseeds itself and grows in the spring when conditions are just right. If you like it, leave it be. Self-sown plants are often the least fussy.

img_20191210_082746432 — Lettuce, spinach, tatsoi, and Hon Tsai Tai, a broccoli-like green, thrive under cool conditions. Damage thanks to slugs.

In my home garden, I’ve been able to overwinter a few of these crops–lettuce, arugula, bunching onions, spinach, tatsoi, carrots, parsley, cilantro, kale, and Hon Tsai Tai, a broccoli-like green–under protection. They didn’t grow much, but under protection, the limitation seemed to be more about diminishing winter light than cold.

On the other side of spring, a few of these crops such as the ones marked* generally can carry over well into hot conditions. With regard to one of these crops–carrots–I think a better option is to select quick-growing cultivars that mature in late spring/early summer, and then squeeze in another crop of in the fall, perhaps for overwintering. They’ll taste sweeter if they are harvested in cool conditions.

Some of the others on the cool list, such as lettuce, have cultivars purported to withstand the heat. I have yet to find a lettuce I can grow well in the summer heat, no matter what the claim on the seed packet. (Anyone? I’d love to have some lettuce with my summer cucumbers and tomatoes.) BUT, you can cheat the season a little by growing leafy vegetables in partially shaded areas.

One other note: Last summer my parsley bolted (went to seed) in early summer, and I have since read that young parsley seedlings exposed to substantial cold are more likely to have this tendency. In this case, you may want to grow a backup batch for late summer/fall. If the winter is not too harsh, they’ll even overwinter.

Ready to do some cool growing? Happy spring, everyone!

For more reading:

Cold-weather growing tips from Seed Savers Exchange.

Tips on when to start cold-weather crops from GrowVeg.

Also from GrowVeg, the “mess of protecting plants from stress.” Lol, this is how my front yard looks right now, with hoop houses and frost blankets. Take a quick look at this article if only to see their simple, but smart way to keep plastic milk jugs in place as cloches.

The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener by Niki Jabbour (2011) is a great beginners’ resource for learning all about season extension and growing in cool and cold seasons. It’s available free from Hoopla; I liked it so much I purchased my own copy.

Eliot Coleman is well-known for four-season gardening. Here are two titles, Four-Season Harvest and The Winter Harvest Handbook. Available through Old Colony Library Network.

Use this planting schedule as a very rough guide.

Here’s a more tailored seed-starting and setting-out calculator from Johnny’s. (Note that you have to enter our region’s frost-free date, which can be tricky to figure out. The Farmer’s Almanac reports a frost-free date of April 22, using weather data from South Weymouth and allowing for a 30% risk of frost.) I feel all right using this data for cold-weather plants, but for warm-weather plants, I like less risk of frost.

Month: January 2020

Five Indoor Seed-Starting Tips from Margaret Roach’s A Way to Garden