Value-added transplants

A quick trip to a local big-box home supply store required an initial detour through the garden center's display of vegetables and herbs (not the point of the excursion!) It looked like there were more plants than the last time I visited.

I wasn't surprised with the array of hardy kale, cabbage, and other transplants. Even the herb varieties offered up looked OK, although cilantro and arugula transplants are decidedly unsuited to the warm spring weather that's just around the corner here.

But I've got to give the transplant producing company credit for being proactive and imaginative; they had snap pea transplants (!) for sale (also labeled as sweet peas...), onion plants in 6-packs, and a number of other things that I hadn't seen offered before in previous seasons. Now snow peas are very easy to sow directly, and best grown that way, but geez, what a clever idea to try to get folks to buy a 6-pack for more than the price of a packet of seeds? They were attractive, too; they might even grow well if very gently and quickly transplanted.

Less reasonable were the bean plants (it's still a month until our last frost date). They're not likely to be successful if planted out now, and neither will the cucumber and squash plants also on offer. The Mr. Stripey tomatoes (and all the regular Early Girl sorts) looked nice enough now, having recently been delivered from warm greenhouses, but wouldn't be happy in the currently cold, wet soil, not to mention air temperatures below 50° F. This is simply value-added marketing at work.

I felt like nabbing Mr. Stripey and bringing him home to put on the heating mat under grow lights for the next month. Oh, dear.

I'm glad that the main producers are providing a greater variety of transplants, and maybe encouraging beginning gardeners, but do wish that plants were provided at the right time to plant! To their credit, the info on their (the producers) website is decent.

Finally, some planted garlic

I cleaned up beds in the main vegetable garden and the satellite garden today. It was nice to be back in the garden, after too much time focused on other things. I fussed (to myself) about being late to do these things, but whatever. All things in their time.

After a Sunday morning walk with my gardening companion (and my gardening assistant - aka my husband and dog), I set to work pulling up spent tomatoes, peppers, and lagenaria squash, and started amending beds for planting.

I planted this bed with Inchelium Red and Early Italian, with multiplier potato onions in a small patch towards the thyme.

Planting time

I'm definitely ready to get my hands back in the garden. I miss the grounding of checking plants, cleaning up beds, and sowing seeds after a couple of weeks of having my attention required elsewhere.

This perennial border appreciated Tropical Storm Fay's moisture a few weeks ago.
Three flats of native perennials are waiting to be planted. They're from a family-owned local native plant nursery (Carolina Wild) and are destined for the pollinator garden next to the Nature Center and in the front meadow at home. The nursery proprietors, both young and knowledgeable, grow an excellent selection of plants from locally-collected seeds and cuttings, most of which are difficult (if not impossible) to find unless you grow them yourself. I had pre-ordered a selection before her Garden program on Friday, but couldn't resist adding quite a few more.

I also have lettuce, chard, mustard, kale, and other greens to sow in the main vegetable garden (not to mention cleaning up the remnants of beans, squash, and cucumbers). It may be a bit late for some of them, but maybe frost will come late this year. And there are beds to prepare for the garlic and onion sets to plant towards the end of the month.

In the meantime, there are tomatoes, peppers, lagenaria and tromboncino squash to harvest, all pretty remarkable given how dry it is (and I had forgotten to leave watering instructions for my gardening companion while I was away).

We saw a hummingbird visiting the Mexican bush sage in early evening, monarchs nectaring on the butterfly bush, and the Japanese persimmons on the small tree that we transplanted from our first house have turned orange.

A front entrance to the garden

Our front yard didn't always look this way. When we moved in, it was a long dull expanse of lawn, punctuated by a row of magnolias and dogwoods, in alternation with a single white pine. Beyond that was a dying red tip hedge, planted by the second owner (we're the third owners).

We've lived here almost fifteen years now, but it didn't take long for the young trees that my gardening companion planted to make a difference.

Now, it's like a natural woodland, with a variety of native hardwoods developing the canopy, with an understory of small native trees and shrubs. All that we did was try to recreate (and speed up) what nature might do in a open field, if there were ample seed sources nearby.

We had to provide our own saplings; but the regenerative power of planting is as simple as digging a hole, amending the soil a bit, and keeping a young tree or shrub watered through its first seasons (and maybe a bit during exceptional droughty times like now.)

An nice comment from a fellow blogger on another post got me thinking about this again -- we're not 'experienced gardeners'-- we do know about plants, but that doesn't mean we knew how to grow things very well when we bought a old house that we fell in love with. My parents certainly weren't gardeners.

And since we transformed our lawn expanses into a wildlife-friendly garden, simply by planting a diversity of native (mostly) shrubs and trees (and we're still working on it) -- I'd like to think encouragingly that all it takes is a shovel and a plant. And repeating that. And then doing it again. And replacing plants that don't do well. And there's great joy in the results.

So when should I actually plant fall vegetables?

There's no dearth of advice about growing fall vegetables, but it's definitely a matter of figuring out your particular weather patterns, growing benefits and challenges, and thinking creatively about what to try (and sorting out what you read, and the location of the person who wrote it).

Our Southeastern U.S. Zone 7 (determined solely by frost dates) is quite different than Zone 7 in coastal Oregon, for example. And, different species need different lengths of time to mature before frost, and are affected by shortening days and cooler weather depending on the species (and cultivars), too.

a red-stemmed chicory looking unfazed by heat and drought

And, the recommendations of 'plant in mid-summer' or 'plant in late summer' are not terribly helpful when it's still 95° in the late afternoon. As a beginning vegetable gardener some years ago, I had the (very mistaken) notion that fall vegetables were planted in the fall.

In hot summer soils, trying to germinate seeds of cool-season vegetables such as carrots and lettuce often requires supplemental help in late summer (shading, damp straw, burlap, covering with boards). I've sprinkled ice cubes on the lettuce flats to help cool down the potting mix, following advice from an experienced local gardener. Carrot seeds are notoriously slow to germinate, in any case, as are some of the other species in the carrot family (parsnips and parsley come to mind). Wild species quite often have these stretched-out germination behaviors, and/or complex dormancy, partially as a response to optimize survival of seedlings.

An old way to germinate seeds that need cooler temperatures or that require perfect moisture balance is simply to start them indoors. Layering seeds in wet paper towels enclosed in a covered container provides a head start to triggering germination; the trick is to monitor them closely so at the first sign of young roots, you can transfer the sprouted seeds to prepared beds (before the root hairs attach to the paper towels). I suppose you could use a shallow layer of damp vermiculite or potting mix, too, but I haven't tried that.

What I've found most helpful are market-gardening publications (extension offices generally have good ones; I just printed out a succession planting chart that conveniently included space for your own notations about what you planted and when) and books (like Four-season Harvest by Elliot Coleman) that provide detailed information on different crops connected with frost dates, days to maturity, and recommendations for specific crops.

But there's always quite a bit of leeway, depending on how changeable one's fall weather patterns are, how late the first frost is in a given year, and climate change is now in the mix.

But, that's what makes it so fun to be a gardener.

A perfect spring morning

The morning was lovely: cool, not humid- perfect to notice things in the garden. The blue flax (Linum perenne) was a striking clear blue, against our weathered gray fence.

The deep purple of May night sage, Salvia nemorosa, made a nice combination with it.

The main vegetable garden is waiting for tomatoes and peppers, while the satellite garden's onions, garlic, and potatoes are flourishing.

I'll be planting squash seeds there this weekend, to rotate in as I start harvesting the garlic and onions.