Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Last call for bare root fruit trees. This is the most economical way to plant an orchard, so choose your trees now.

• Sweet peas, with their memorable fragrance, can be planted now from nursery starts for wonderful bouquets later this spring.

• Asparagus will provide you with delicious, low-priced spears for years to come if you plant them now from dormant crowns.

• Tomatoes can be set out with protection. “Season Starter” will protect them down to 20°F and will give them a warm environment during the day.

• Potatoes like to grow in the cool weather of spring. Plant them as soon as possible.

The Spring Vegetable Garden

When the worst of the wet and cold is behind us, it is time to start turning up a garden bed or two and starting some spring vegetables. The months of March, April and May give us warm days and chilly nights that are perfect for many delicious vegetables.

You can now set out seedlings of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, onions, chard and lettuce. From seed you can start beets, carrots, Swiss chard, lettuce, peas and spinach.

Cabbage and broccoli are members of the cole family. “Cole” is the Old English word for cabbage and is the name given to a group of vegetables that share a common ancestry and a family preference for cool weather. Other garden relatives include cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, collards, turnips, radishes, bok choy and baby bok choy.

Seeing these plants side by side, you might find it hard to see what cabbages have in common with kohlrabi or broccoli. But the diverse appearance of cole family members comes from a single remarkable family trait — the ability to thicken various plant parts. Thus the kohlrabi has thickened stems; broccoli has thickened immature flowering branches; turnips and radishes have thickened roots; and with cabbage, the thickening forms the heads.

Lettuce also needs cool weather to be at its best. There are many different kinds of lettuce: looseleaf has tender, delicate, and mildly flavoured leaves; butterheads, also called Boston or buttercrunch, form loose heads; romaine, also called cos, grows in a long head of sturdy leaves and crispheads, also called iceberg, forms tight, dense heads. Leaves come in various shades of red and green. You can set out plants and plant seeds at the same time to have successive crops this spring.

Root crops grow well in the spring also. Carrots are easy to start in the cool, spring weather. Carrot seeds are tiny and germinate best in damp soil when the soil temperature is between 50 and 60 degrees. Beets, onions, radishes and turnips all grow very rapidly in the spring.

Peas are perhaps the most popular spring vegetable. There’s nothing quite so sweet and delicious as fresh garden peas. Dwarf varieties grow 18 to 24 inches tall and stand best with some support. The tall varieties grow 6 to 8 feet high and need poles or string, or wire trellises to climb. You can grow shelling peas or edible-pod varieties, also known as sugar peas, or the flat edible-pod varieties known as snow peas, popular in Asian cooking.

Take advantage of this nice spring weather and start your vegetable garden producing now.