Time to Start Planting the Garden

As winter’s snows melt and birds begin their territorial morning songs, it’s time to get planting. Many plants need to wait until the soil and air truly warm up, but there are also others that don’t care. A complete list is available to you for free from this website at your request.

I have already planted peas, snow peas, beets, Swiss chard, lettuce, kale, potatoes, onions, green cabbage, red cabbage and Brussels sprouts. It took them a little longer to appear than normal which somewhat confused me. It has been extremely dry here and I was watering away so that the seeds could germinate. Then I got an email with a great article explaining “poor man’s fertilizer” (snow). It seems that snow as well as rain contains nitrogen which can help plants get started. After a rain, everybody showed up.

The lettuce is up and will need thinning soon.

The peas have made an appearance.

Asparagus is tantalizingly close to picking size.

Onion plants can be purchased and are usually better than onion sets.

The garlic that was planted in October is up and doing quite well.

My radicchio came back. I was surprised. I never got around to cleaning it out in the fall. Glad that I didn’t!

---