Kick-Start Your Garden

Spring has arrived, and while this is the time of year that many gardeners start transplants - few know that it can also be a good time to plant some things outside!

The spring equinox is is upon us! The birds are singing, the daffodils are pushing up, and even the odd fly can be seen buzzing around outdoors sometimes. All signs are indicating that from this point onward, each of our 24 hour trips around the sun will have increasingly more day and less night in them. As a result, every day will gradually be more sunny and warm, and nature will begin to show many signs that it is “go-time”. For us gardeners, this is the time of year that we start thinking about transplants, and maybe getting out in the garden for a little pruning and spring cleaning - but few people know that it can also be a good time to plant some things outside. Where I live, many gardeners follow a rule-of-thumb that instructs them to not put any seeds in the ground until the last week of May. While this is good advice for many plants, and some things need an even later start to be 100% certain they will not be destroyed by frost, there are a few things that can go in the ground right now (if it’s thawed).

Even tough the ground is still frozen outside, the spinach in this hoophouse are doing fine!

Some plants love the cold

Last year I wrote an article in April about planting times, and how a simple and reliable planting schedule can be organized around the stages of growth of the dandelion. In that article, I talked about minimum germination temperatures, and how they can range from as low as 2° Celsius to as high as 16° Celsius. This time of year, it is only the plants at the low end of that spectrum (2° Celsius) that can go in the ground; which are lettuce, onion, parsnip and spinach (and other related plants). Not only do these plants have low germination temperatures, they can also survive the subfreezing temperatures that regularly still happen in early spring - both in terms of seed viability and the foliage of young seedlings.