Freezing Temperatures Tonight (pick your tomatoes)

It's kind of late for this - I wish I'd thought to post about this a few days ago - but freezing temperatures are forecast for tonight.

Plants that were fine to plant in early spring should also be fine now at these temperatures, e.g. chard, arugula, mizuna, mustard greens.  (Chard is the only one that will still be around from spring, but you might have planted more of the others later or have "volunteers" growing from the left-over seeds.)

However, if you have basil outside or still have tomatoes on the vine, you probably should pick them right now (I mean: right now, before you go to bed!), even if they are still green.  Otherwise, they may be destroyed outside tonight.

Even picked green, larger tomatoes will usually ripen inside in a few days or weeks, if they're weren't extremely green. Just leave them sitting out at room temperature, and use them as they ripen.  (I have found cherry tomatoes don't ripen as well, but if they are already partly changed colour, they will probably make it.)  Green or partially ripe tomatoes can also be good cooked or preserved in various ways - you'll find lots of recipes online, of course.

Note that depending on your location, you may not actually hit the forecast low.  The urban heat effect can make a few degrees of difference - often it seems like my location at Bloor and Dufferin gets milder temperatures than the Environment Canada forecasts, and further east, past Christie from Bloor southwards often seems noticeably even warmer.

You may also be able cover your plants with a blanket, and that might be enough to protect them.

I picked mine just as it was getting dark, and then realized I should write this.  But now you'll need a flashlight.

Winding Down

Usually my gardening winds down by this time of year.  The work is mainly harvesting, rather than weeding and watering.  (And, it seems, not much blogging either.)

From the short list vegetables, you will probably still be able to harvest climbing beans, chard, chicory, cherry tomatoes, basil, and nasturtiums - all right until the first frost, which usually doesn't arrive in Toronto until October; or even later some years.  Chard and chicory will usually survive longer, until things really start to freeze hard in November some time.  One year, I was still getting greens in December, but that's unusual.

If you grew arugula, mustard greens, or mizuna in the spring, and they went to seed, you may have small volunteer seedlings growing in the same place now.  They are likely to grow quite well and give you some fall greens to eat.

This year, by the way, we are getting very little fall rain, so you probably should be watering if you still have vegetables out there.

For myself, I am doing more fall gardening this year, because I've done fall plantings of some of the spring vegetables.  Many people say it works great, but I haven't usually done it.  Depending on the results this year, I may include that in next year's version of this blog.


Feedback

Finally, I'd really love to have feedback about this blog, to help me improve it for next year.

My main goal is to make it very easy for new gardeners to garden successfully for the first time, without having to learn a lot in advance.  How do you think I could do that better?

It would help me a lot to hear what you think.  You can add comments here, or email me at sideplot@gmail.com to let me know.

Watering, Harvesting, Collecting Mustard Seed

If you are growing bush beans, chances are you have seen the first small white or pink flowers, and maybe small beans are already forming. If you are growing tomatoes, the plants likely have small green fruit, or perhaps even ripening ones if you planted quite large seedlings.

Basil plants are probably large now if you bought seedlings, or maybe even if you grew your own from seed. You can start to pick occasionally from your basil plant once it's a foot high or so, and more as it gets larger. A few fresh leaves are amazing chopped raw into a salad or in a sandwich. Rather than pick the lower leaves, it's actually good to pick an end cluster of basil leaves at the top of a stem (especially when flowers start to form there). Pick off the top part of a stem, just above a pair of healthy leaves below. When you do that, new stems will start to grow from the where that lower pair of large leaves join the stem. The replacement stems will be more numerous than what you picked first, and your plant will become nice and bushy, rather than tall and spindly as it would be if you picked the lower leaves first.

Watering Needed

In this weather, you should be watering things deeply at least once a week, possibly more. Obviously if plants are wilting, they need more! On the other hand, watering too much causes problems. (Okay, I don't know what those problems are: too much care has never been one of my gardening problems.)

For plants growing in the ground, once your plants are large so that they are fully shading their own ground, evaporation will be less, and they should have a well-developed root system. The ones on the short list will be fine with a deep watering once a week or so. As I mentioned before, a deep watering means enough water to soak deeply into the soil. You might find a different way, but I use a bucket, and a small container to pour water from the bucket around each plant. I make a small pool, and each time the small pool soaks in completely I pour some more, until I've percolated water down 2 or 3 times for each large plant. I do just use my intuition for how much - if you need more guidance, I'm not a good source!

For plants in containers, with the high heat and unusually dry weather (for Toronto) we've been having, you may need to water more often, perhaps every few days. Poking into the soil can give you some sense of how much moisture is retained. This is when pots within pots can provide a little protection from the worst heat.

Collecting Mustard Family Seeds

If you let them grow out, then your mustard family plants: arugula, mizuna, and mustard, by now will probably have ripened seed pods. Some may not yet: usually mizuna is first, arugula is second, and mustard is last.

If you want to keep seed for next year, you can collect seed when the pods have dried out enough to pop open almost at a touch.  I rarely buy seeds for these three, since they are very easy to collect and the seeds keep very well. The seeds I collect always sprout well for me the next spring.

Hold a round container (like a large plastic yoghurt container, for example) right beneath the pods hanging from their stems. Roll the pods between your fingers. As the pods open, some will drop their seeds; other pods will open but fall into the container themselves. When you have a container full of tiny black or brown seeds and dry pods, roll the pods in the container with your fingers some more to get all the seeds out of them.

The seeds now should be settled mainly on the bottom of the container, and the pods on top of them. You can pick out the pods, but that is a bit tedious. What's more fun is to blow (very gently at first!) slightly downwards along the inside of one side of the container. Your breath will circle around in the container and swirl the dry pods right up and out of container surprisingly quickly, while the small seeds will stay in the bottom as long as you don't blow too hard. (Okay, I always get some pods in my face. It always happens faster than I think.)

After you separate the seeds, you should leave them out in an open bowl or container on a shelf for several weeks to make sure they have time to dry fully. After that you can put them in a paper envelope and store them in a basically dry place. Make sure to label each envelope with the type of plant and the year. It's probably impossible to tell from looking whether it's mustard, mizuna, or arugula seed, and you also want to make sure that each year you are planting the previous year's seed. (If you collect from several of these, and they are sitting in bowls drying at the same time, you may also need to label the bowls.)

Just Keep Going

If you grew spring stuff, hopefully you are harvesting happily now. The only thing from the early group that is still small now for me is chard. I've eaten a bit, but not much.

The things planted in late spring are probably still a while away: my beans are still small plants with no flowers yet. I have the very first one or two tiny green tomatoes forming, on the two plants that I bought as large seedlings. My own smaller seedlings which I started myself have not yet grown to flowering size. My basil is still extremely tiny.

Anyway, now that the plants are bigger, it's usually easier to manage them. Just keep up on weeding, and watering them (not this weekend, obviously, if you're growing them in the open). Once plants are well established, most of them need only a good, deep watering once a week. Deep means you pour water into the pot, trench, or depression a few times, so that the water can flow down far into the soil, where the roots grow. Many plants will have roots that go several feet or more under the soil surface, and that is where you want the water (where it won't evaporate the next day).

If you have any questions, please ask.

Because I have had more insect trouble this year than before, I've learned more about controlling insects this year. All my insect problem seem to have reduced to a more normal state: a few bites and holes here and there. Hand-picking the large ones, and diatomaceous earth for the small ones seems to have worked.

For the first time I've also been using my Korean "Homi" garden tool to weed with the blade. (Before I only used it for digging to loosen and prepare the soil for planting.) To weed, you run the straight edge of the tool (its blade) along the soil surface, cutting off small weeds. Farmers use long handled tools to weed like this, so they can do long rows very fast. Mine is a short one like a trowel. It takes a bit of practice and care to weed like this, especially so you don't kill your own plants too, but it's definitely faster than hand weeding. (On the other hand, if you have a nice small patch, hand-weeding won't take long. It's all I've done in the past.)

Vegetable Harvesting Hints, and Tomato Side Shoots

Tomato Side Shoots

Tomatoes are naturally large spreading vines. Varieties that are not listed as determinate on the package will grow this way. Heritage and open-pollinated varieties are mostly indeterminate, meaning they will grow continuously as spreading vines, and if they are cherry tomatoes, produce more and more fruit all the while, until the frost kills them.

That's great: that's why cherry tomatoes are on the short list. They just keep growing larger and growing more fruit.

However, there can be too much of a good thing. As they grow, they like to send out more and more side branches. These will fill up your garden with tomato branches. The side shoots themselves have side shoots, so this is literally exponential growth we are talking about.

Therefore it's normal to pinch off some or all side branches while they are just starting out. (People also say the excessive leaf growth will use resources and slow the production of the fruit. I'm not sure this is true for vigorous cherry tomatoes, since every branch seems to produce more fruit. Space is the main issue with cherry tomatoes.)

It takes a bit of practice to spot the side shoots while they are small. They start out in the V where each of the tomato's big compound leaf stems meets its main stem. (The botical term for this spot where new stems emerge is called the leaf axil.) Left alone, the side shoots quickly grow into a full-fledged stem, with leaves, fruit, and... more side shoots of their own. Every single leaf spawns a side shoot, and every single side-shoot's leaves spawn their own side shoots.

I usually aim to allow a few branches on each plant, and pinch off all the rest. They grow so fast some always get away from me. If they're not in a bad place, I may let the extra one grow, or I may cut it off even if it's already somewhat large.

On the other hand, if you are totally out of vertical space, you can also cut stems off at the ends so they don't grow longer. But if you prevent all new growth, you will also prevent all new fruit. In that case, you might want to allow new side shoots to grow from below.

Harvesting Vegetables

I should have thought to talk about this earlier. I'm not sure how much of this is obvious.

For the leaf vegetables (arugula, mizuna, mustard, chard, basil), you can just keep harvesting the largest leaves, while always leaving enough leaf area on the plant so it can feed itself to grow more leaves or grow seed (if you want to collect seed). You don't need to cut them: just break the leaf stem off near the base.

By this time of year, arugula, mizuna, and mustard usually have also started growing tall seed stalks with only small leaves on them. You can still continue to harvest leaves off the seed stalks, and also you can eat the flowers (which are essentially the same as extremely tiny broccoli florets). Even the seed pods are edible, though I find them tough. Anyway, these are all good ones to collect your own seed from, to plant next year, so don't eat all the flowers and pods if you want to do that. When they dry out completely, you can collect the seed. (More about that in a future post.)

Pea pods may also be ready, depending on when you planted. They are tenderer if you pick smaller pods, of course. I have heard that they bear more peas if you don't let any pods mature, but I'm not sure if that's really true. Again, you may want to collect seeds for next year, in which case you'll have to let some pods mature, later when the plants are getting close to the end. (Pea plants finish and die by mid-summer.) Beans are young yet, but will be similar, except that climbing beans continue to produce beans all summer, slowing down gradually through the summer and into the fall.

Basil branches side shoots extensively, a lot like tomatoes do, but they are much smaller plants, so space is not an issue. What it does mean is that you can pick off the end clusters of branches, and let the new growth generate from those leaf axils. The supply of fresh leaves lasts until the first frost if you do this. When basil starts to get big, it will also start to produce flowers, and rumor has it that you should pull off the flowers to keep the plant growing actively, or for better tasting leaves. Again, of course, you will want to let some flowers mature at some point if you want to keep seed for next year. I do pick off the flowers as they form (before they open), and my plants keep going all summer and fall. At some point I pick a few whole large plants to make pesto with. In late summer I also let a few flower and produce seed.

Interlude

From now until August, there's nothing to do but weed, water, and harvest, as needed.

Then in August, it will be time to plant more "spring" greens, which will mature and be harvestable until the first really heavy freezes.  Usually you can continue to eat greens from the garden here in Toronto until mid-November or later.

Trouble Off the Short List

As for me, I'm having insect problems I've never had before. For one thing, I've tried some new things this year that are not on the short list, and I can see why they won't ever be! Broccoli, for example, is a brassica, closely related to mizuna, arugula, and mustard, but because it has to grow much longer and bigger, it is far more susceptible to insects. At worst, the spring greens get some holes in them, and then you harvest them and they are done. But my broccoli are attracting all kinds of things I have never seen in my garden.

One short list item is also getting insect attention for the first time, and that's my beans. It seems I have bean beetles (though I haven't seen them, I'm just interpreting the damage). So another factor here is that I have been growing more things in my garden for longer, and so I now I guess I have a greater variety of different insects around, including the harmful ones.

In all cases I'm reading up on the different signs and symptoms, and trying different natural controls. For the larger things: slugs, cabbage butterfly caterpillars, hand picking is helping. Slug numbers are way down, and I'm getting good at spotting the velvety pale green cabbage butterfly caterpillars on the broccoli leaves.

For smaller things or mysterious things I've never spotted but can only speculate on the identity of, diatomaceous earth seems to be helping. DE is fine white dust, a crushed mineral deposit of fossilized microorganisms. It is an abrasive gets into bugs shells and dries them out. It's relatively safe for people (used in natural cosmetic products), though you should not inhale the dust, which contains silica.

What didn't work well was the garlic/chile insecticidal soap. It was not dilute enough, and definitely caused harm to the broccoli leaves I sprayed. As always, internet sources are highly unreliable. (Beware the endlessly proliferating e-How sites, they are very inaccurate!) I later found another, better source which had a much more dilute recipe. I wish I had researched more thoroughly before I used the first recipe. I may return to that, although if DE continues working, I will avoid insecticidal soap (which seems to kill beneficial insects more readily than DE).

Water, Weeds, and Bugs

I highly recommend spending time with your garden often. That way you'll appreciate its beauty more, while also seeing what's going on and doing the work in small dose. I find taking care of the garden that way more enjoyable and satisfying than going out for hours at a time once in a while. If your garden is in a place where you can do other things, that's even better. It's nice to just watch the wild bees, for instance.


Watering Time

Since the weather has now become hot and dry (finally!), you will need to start watering regularly. The tiniest plants need to have at least slightly damp soil right near the surface. But once plants start to get beyond the first set of leaves, they are also putting out lots of roots, and you can start to let them collect moisture from deeper down. Try digging a bit to see how deep you have to go to find damp soil.

Greens tend to get stronger tasting if they are in hotter and drier weather, so you can water them more if you want to try to keep them milder. Also, hot weather makes them flower, which is the beginning of end of their life cycle. My mizuna and arugula are flowering now. The flowers are edible and taste like broccoli (which makes sense since broccoli is an overdeveloped flower in the same family). But don't eat them all, as you can collect seed for next year if you let the seed pods mature.

Tomatoes, once established, have deep roots, and can be watered less often, though uneven moisture conditions will stress any of vegetable plants. Digging down somehwhere nearby is always a good way to check.

Also, once your plants are strong, you can "mulch" to conserve moisture in the soil. "Mulch" in gardening means absolutely anything covering the soil, and people do use an extremely wide range of things. I like straw, generally. My local hardware store (Bastone, on Dufferin at Hallam) carries straw bales. But mulch can also give shelter to slugs and snails, and since I have had a lot of slugs, I will not mulch for quite a while, until all my plants are large and thriving.

Weeds and Bugs

Now is also high season for weeds and bugs. Many of your plants are still probably pretty small, and so somewhat defenceless.

On the one hand, it's best not to get too hung up on control. Biodiversity is your friend: a broad mixture of plants (including weeds) and bugs (including pests) is valuable. Pests in modest amounts support their own predators and parasites in modest amounts, which in turn keep those same pests under control for you. Weeds, in modest amounts, contribute well to the biodiversity of your garden, supporting beneficial insects, birds, and soil organisms.

So it's good to let things be somewhat disorderly/diverse. Weed enough to give your own plants a strong upper hand, and remove obviously harmful critters when you find them (e.g. slugs, tomato horn worms).

On the other hand, sometimes you definitely need to take more decisive action, or you will lose what you are trying to grow. Only some problems will solve themselves. (For example, I used to have lots of aphids, but now they seem to be under control - so I guess something came along to control them for me.)

I have not tried to control slugs much for years, however, and they have been increasing. This spring was an especially good slug spring. My plants were getting eaten pretty badly while they were tiny. So I have been coming out often in the evening for a few minutes before it gets too dark, to search for slugs on the plants themselves, and I have also been looking under bricks and things where the big ones hide during the day. Many of them were tiny ones, so it took a while to find the majority of them (usually just barely visible, clinging to stems or leaves at dusk), but since I started, it has made a big difference.

For the first time, I am also going to try to control something tiny that eats plants in the brassica family - I haven't figured out what, yet. My greens (mizuna, mustard, tat soi) don't usually take enough damage to matter, but I am growing broccoli this year, so I need these much larger plants to be healthy and energetic for a long time. (They are all in the same family, and have the same pests.)

Unlike slugs, these insects are too small and elusive to find and remove. The broccoli leaves are getting eaten pretty badly, so I am making up some gourmet natural pesticide/repellent: garlic and hot pepper infused natural soap mixture to spray on just the broccoli plants, and see if I can reduce the damage. I haven't tried this before, so not sure how it will go.

Over time, you will also learn to recognize your own most troublesome weeds, and then you can focus on removing those more thoroughly as you weed, while not worrying so much about minor ones that don't get in the way too much.

One helpful weeding technique when you have a lot of area to cover is to use the edge of a trowl to scrape/cut very small weeds just as they come up. Be careful not to injure your own plants, of course. Seedlings don't have enough resources to recover from this cutting treatment, even if the root is left intact. Small-scale organic farmers use sharpened tools for this, even mounted on wheels to weed whole rows quickly.

Again, the most helpful thing is to check out your patch quite often. Then you will catch problems before they get too large.

Planting Transplants

The weather has finally gotten warm enough to plant warm weather crops. On our shortlist, that's beans, tomatoes, basil, and nasturtiums. In fact, warm and moist like this is ideal.

The only problem is that the soil is pretty wet from all the rain we've had already. If it's too muddy, it sticks together and to your trowel, and it's hard to get things planted well, so you should try digging a bit to see how your soil is. If it's already got lots of compost in it, it may be fine after just a few hours of warm, rain-free weather. Otherwise, you need to wait: keep checking and seize the soil is no longer too muddy.

It's best to soak beans overnight or even for 24 hours before you plant them, since they will germinate much faster that way.

The others on this list: tomatoes, basil, and nasturtiums are usually planted as seedlings rather than as seed. In principal, they can be grown from seed in the garden now, too. If you do that, you should know that they may take a while to sprout, and also they are quite slow growing at first and often get eaten by slugs or snails when they are tiny. So you should plant a few extra seeds in place and then thin out later.

But if you are following the usual practice...

Transplanting Seedlings

Dig a hole that fits the pot the seedling is in, but is deeper.

Add some compost (if you didn't just prepare the soil with compost this year) and try to losen and mix the dirt that will be surrounding and beneath your seedling. This makes it easier for the seedling to grow its roots, which will be quite deep and wide in most cases.

Carefully remove the seedling from the pot, with as little stress on any part of the plant as you can manage. It often helps to tear the thin plastic of a nursury pot away from the earth and roots in the pot. You are trying to disturb its roots as little as possible, since the roots are very fragile. The actual root hairs that absorb water are microscopic. The more you damage those, the less water and nutrients the seedling will get after planting until it regrows them.

Stressing the seedling and its roots as little as possible, lower the roots into the hole with one hand, and use the other to fill in earth beneath it and around it. Press down gently to firm up the earth it's now planted in.

Ideally, the plant ends up in a very slight depression, making it easy to water. Water by filling the depression with a cup or so of water, so you can see that as the water soaks in, the earth surrounding the seedling is well wetted, but not soupy.

For most plants, you should take care when transplanting not to add any extra earth around the stem of the seedling, which might rot it. Tomatoes are an exception to this: plant them deeper when you transplant them, as deep as the first set of leaves. They will grow additional roots from the submerged part of the stem, making for a stronger, healthier plant later.

You should make sure that the plants have slightly moist soil at all times for at least a few days, while they regenerate their roots. Looking at the weather forecast, that should be pretty effortless.

Buying Seedlings

It's now approaching the usual time to plant late spring crops. On the shortlist we have beans, tomatoes, basil, and nasturtiums. Off the shortlist, all the viney, meloney things like it very warm: zucchini, cucumbers, etc. Those ones might be better to plant out in another few weeks.

If you are planting tomatoes, basil, or nasturtiums (from the shortlist), you will probably be buying them as seedlings, unless you already started them from seed yourself, hopefully a few weeks ago.

(I did start things from seed, and my seedlings are still very tiny, as the cold weather inside my house meant that they sprouted very slowly. Next year, I think I will buy some seed-starting equipment: a germinating heating pad, and possibly a grow light.)

When buying seedlings, you have to consider whether they are 'hardened off' yet. If the seedlings have come direct from a greenhouse or indoor growing, immediate full exposure to direct sunlight and cool nights will be too much for them. That will shock them, slowing their growth or occasionally even kill them (unlikely). So it's worth giving them some gradual exposure to outdoor conditions after you buy them, if you're not sure. (Ask the seller, of course.)

Though actually, the weather forecast doesn't contain very much direct sunlight or cool nights right now. Nor much soil dry enough to plant in.

Next week, I'll talk planting the late spring crops, and about transplanting seedlings into the garden.

Weeding

Meanwhile, if you've already planted early spring crops, try to keep up on the weeding in regular small doses, to make sure your plants win. When yours are well established, then they will tend to shade out weeds and there will be less weeding to do.

Climbing Support for Peas

If you planted peas, remember they're going to need something to climb once they are about 3 inches tall.

Providing support often requires a bit of thought. For example, my fence is great for them to climb, but the good climbing part doesn't start until about a foot off the ground. So I have to bridge the gap with twine, which I wrap around and around from the bottom of the fence down to a long stick that lays on the ground. This gives each pea plant a string to climb.

The peas start spiralling around as they grow, trying to find something to climb. You can help them get where you want sooner by moving them to your string and winding their tendils around it. That is usually all it takes to get them clinging and climbing.

Waiting, Weeding...

If you've planted early spring things, now is the time where mostly you wait. Since we've had such damp weather, if you are growing under open sky, it's unlikely you have even needed to water. In any case, make sure the soil where you have planted seeds stays damp constantly until the plants are a few inches tall. After that, the surface can get dry, though of course you'll need to keep the root zone watered enough. More about that in a future post.

Weeding is also good, since by now many weed seeds will have sprouted as well. But don't weed unless you are confident you know which plants are yours and which are the weeds. Once you know that, weeding frequently is a great thing.  If you kept things small, then each time it's just a little work to weed, and the more often you do it, the less work it is next time.

If you are waiting to plant the late spring things like tomatoes and basil, don't be tempted to start early. It's really best to wait until about the May 24th weekend before you plant frost-tender seedlings outside. But to give you advance warning, you should buy the seedlings about a week before you want to plant them outside, so you can "harden them off". If the seedlings you buy have only ever lived in a greenhouse (which is typical), they will not be ready for the unshielded sun and normal night coolness. So you have to take a few days of putting them out in the sun for a little while, and bringing them inside on very cold nights, but leaving them out on moderately cool nights. That lets them get used to real-world conditions.

Fruit

Beyond our vegetable shortlist, if you would like to plant perrenial fruit plants, now is the time to plant strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and currants. These are all plants that live for years, so you plant them in a place that is their own. Of these, raspberries and currants need more sun (but will tolerate a bit of shade), and strawberries and blackberries are alright with a bit more shade, but still need to have a decent proportion of sun. They are all great to have, producing a lot of fruit for very little work. The main work is stopping them from spreading (all of them spread outwards by their roots, and blackberries will usually grow way too tall as well if you don't prune them through the year).  Also it's good to spread lots of compost on the ground around them each year as well (except for blackberries, which don't need help).

What the New Sprouts Look Like

Depending on when you planted things, you might have sprouts now. Here are some photos to show you what those seedlings will look like when they come up.

But first, here is why chives are a great thing to grow. Not only to they come back year after year, but they do it very early, and in the exact time of year when good garlic is hardest to come by. So you can use fresh chives in things instead of cooked garlic. The photo is of chives in my garden a few weeks ago, so now they're even bigger. I have a few patches, and they repel some problem insects and attract helpful bees when they flower in another month or so.

Now, here are the new sprouts.

Peas (they didn't rot in the cold wet weather!):

Chard:

Next are the mustards. In a previous post, I showed you what all the mustards look like when they first sprout. As sprouts, all these varieties have nearly identical pairs of wide heart-shaped seed leaves, the leaves that open up from within the seed. Broccoli and others in the family have similar seed leaves.

Now that these are all a little older, they still have the heart-shaped seed leaves, but they also have their first so-called true leaves, which show the distinctive shape of each plant type.

Arugula (true leaves have a generally wavy edge and irregular shape):

Red mustard (true leaves are rounded with a toothy edge):

Mizuna (true leaves get long and are very jaggedly toothed):

Update, and Starting Seedlings Indoors

With weather like we've had, if you planted outdoors in the last week or two, it's quite possible you don't have any sprouts coming up yet. If I could have stayed dormant this past week, I would have too.

The good news is that some warmer (if rainy) weather is in the forecast! That should warm up the soil again and get things growing.

The bad news is that if you planted peas, this was the worst possible weather for them. When peas get very cold, wet weather right after they are planted, they tend to rot rather than germinate. That is life and death in the garden. But there is nothing for us to do but wait until we've had a week of warmer weather. If they haven't come up after about 3 weeks, then we have to soak some more, and plant them. The risk is replanting too early, and killing the original ones if they just were about to break the surface. So it's best to try to insert the new ones individually in the same area as the old ones but disturbing the soil as little as possible, in case the old ones are actually starting to grow.

Anyway, for now, you just have to wait and see.



Starting Seeds Indoors

This is not really an easy topic, and actually I don't really recommend it for followers of this blog!

You should probably stop reading right here! (Unless you're just too curious, or determined to start your own seedlings.)

Tomato plants, in particular, are the one thing on our short list that definitely should be started indoors. But most people just buy seedlings that have been started in a greenhouse. Purchased plants they will almost certainly be larger and stronger and mature sooner than if you start the seedlings yourself.

Basil and nasturtiums are other good choices for starting early indoors.

So if you are sure you want to grow those from seed, instead of buying seedlings, I will describe how to do it.

I do start seedlings myself. I haven't had too many failures with starting, but once in a while things don't sprout or die soon after they sprout. That's why I don't really recommend this unless you just really want to. If you want to try, do! There's not really much to lose, and for me it is always more satisfying to do it myself.

And now is the time to start them: it's now about 5 weeks or so until it will likely be a good time to plant warm-weather plants outside.

Note that greenhouse growers start their seedlings earlier than this, and so at planting time theirs will be bigger and stronger than home grown ones. However, new seedlings need a lot of light. So I plant later (now), when I will be able to put my little seedlings outside more of the time (because the weather generally will get better now - this past week notwithstanding).


Containers

If you have ever bought seedlings before, you know that they are usually grown in quite small plastic pots that are joined together. You can buy "flats" like that to grow in at garden centers. Those flats are very fragile, difficult to re-use because they tend to break when you take the seedlings out.

You can also grow in any small pots, in paper or styrofoam cups, or in other small containers that are not for this purpose, as long as they are a few inches deep and you put lots of holes in the bottom.

Lee Valley Tools has a careful selection of specialized reusable seed starting containers. Some of these are "self-watering", which means that the bottoms of the containers are open and rest on a fiber matting that wicks water into the pots from a reservoir below. I have one of these, given to me as a gift a long time ago, and it does work great, and has lasted very well. So if you want to get all fancy, they are a good place to look.

Generally speaking, whatever you use, you want lots of holes or large holes at the bottom, so you can "water from the bottom", which means you can have the containers sitting in a tray, and pour and inch or so of water in the tray, to soak up into the pots through the holes in the bottom. Soil, especially potting soil sucks water up from below quite effectively. That kind of bottom watering is much better for small seedlings. Watering from the top, it is hard to not crush the plants. Furthermore, dampening the plant foliage makes them more susceptible "damping off" (see below).

Self-watering systems, as I described, are definitely the easiest of all, because they constantly water from the bottom, as long as you keep enough water in the reservoir underneath that wets the fiber sheet.



Planting

Commercial growers, and very serious amateurs, start seeds in one container type, then transplant them into larger pots later, and then transplant outside, or possibly even into larger containers again. I don't do that, as you might have guessed, because that is too much work!

Fill your containers, whatever you are using, with potting soil. Potting soil is usually very light, so you need to fill the containers very full and compress.

Soak the material quite well, so that it will be wet enough to keep the seeds damp. Also, if you will be bottom-watering (which I recommend), the potting soil should start quite wet - it's hard to get it soaked through from the bottom if it starts dry.

Once your containers are filled and wetted, plant the tomato or basil seeds in them at the recommended depth - about a half centimetre deep for both.

Tomato seeds will sprout fastest and best if kept warm. My house is cold. They would probably sprout faster if we cranked the thermostat up. If you live in one of those apartments that is always boiling, you are lucky, at least for sprouting seeds.

While waiting for the seedlings to sprout, it also helps to keep them covered, so the surface doesn't try out. However, as soon as they sprout, uncover them, to help prevent damping off.



Damping Off

"Damping off" is plant jargon for very small seedlings dying of fungal infections. There are many recommendations to prevent damping off, including sterilizing potting soil and container, fungicides (both chemical and natural).

I haven't done those, but I don't usually have problems with damping off.

Bottom watering keeps the soil surface and foliage not too damp.

Keeping new seedlings uncovered and well aerated helps too.

Lots of sun is supposed to help, as well. That probably both strengthens the plants, and sterilizes the exposed areas (UV kills fungus).


Light

Seedlings need lots of bright light, as mentioned above. If they don't get it, they desperately try to grow unnaturally tall, hoping to get through whatever is between them and the sun. If they get enough, they will stay very short while they work on their root systems instead, which is what you want. Sunlight also is said to help prevent damping off, as mentioned above.

In general, you should try to get your seedlings in bright sunlight or bright outdoor light as much as possible without exposing them to killer low temperatures (say, below 5 degrees celsius).

The only caveat is if they have been indoors for many days to start with (not great, they will be spindly), too much sun all at once can shock them quite badly as well. This is also often a problem with commercial seedlings, actually, since they were grown in greenhouses or under lights, where the intensity was well below that of full sunlight.

In my attached house, I have only east and west window, nothing south, so whenever possible I ferry my plants back and forth, east in the morning, west in the afternoon, and put them right outside whenever it's not too cold.

What to Expect Now

Most seeds at this time of year take quite a while to germinate in the cool weather and cool soil. Don't worry if you don't see anything for a week or two after your plant. Peas, chives, and chard take even longer, while the mustardy ones: arugula, mizuna, and mustard, tend to sprout a bit sooner.

The most important thing is to make sure the soil stays moist the whole time while the seeds are germinating and also while the plants are extremely tiny.

On the other hand, it's pretty easy to wipe out the tiniest seedlings if you water them too heavily.

So being very careful not to kill anything, keep the soil moist. In the current weather that may mean you don't need to do anything, if occasional rain falls on your patch or containers. And once the seedlings have more than the first two leaves, they will have generated enough roots to gather moisture from a bit wider and deeper and it won't be so critical to keep the surface moist right at the surface. (But you'll want to make sure it doesn't dry out deeper down.)


It can be hard to tell what sprouts are weeds and which ones are your plants. That's where careful planting helps, because you can see the pattern when the seedlings start growing.

Here is what arugula, mustard, and mizuna look like when they sprout:

Notice the approximate straight lines of the rows. The spacing in my rows is pretty irregular. As I mentioned, I try to get them evenly spaced, but handling the tiny mustard seeds is a bit hard, and I'm not too patient. (Possibly some of those extra seeds were planted by my 4 year old who was helping me, but it's not all his fault.)

In any case, a little thinning is still much easier than a lot of thinning. Once the seedlings have grown a little, you can pull out the smallest duplicates, being very careful not to hurt the ones you are trying to leave in. With these types of plants (arugula, mustard, etc.), you can wash and eat the sprouts you pull out: they are very delicious! Of course, don't eat seedlings with poisonous leaves, like tomato seedlings! But all of the early plants for this blog have edible leaves - including the peas.

Even at this stage, the leaves of different vegetable types are often distinctive, however. These mustardy sprouts all have those very distinctive heart-shaped leaves. (Broccoli and Cauliflower have the same shape, since they're in the same family. Their seeds all look quite similar too.)  Here is a close-up:

Peas look completely different - I'll post a picture when mine are up. (They don't look like the beans I posted pictures of earlier, because peas don't raise their seed leaves above the soil like beans do.)

You may also now start to find weed sprouts as well. I have seen some now. As long as they're outside your rows and you are sure they are not the seeds you planted, you can pull them out as you see them. But there's no hurry to pull them out if you are not sure - better safe them sorry! I have, sadly, occasionally weeded my own vegetables. Hopefully once you have your own seedlings clearly growing and identifiable, then you will be able to tell for sure which are the weeds.

Planting the Early Spring Vegetables

If you have finished the previous steps (including Stuff You Need and Preparing Your Plot), and if you're growing any of the early spring vegetables:

• Mizuna
• Arugula
• Mustard Greens
• Chicory
• Chard
• Peas
• Chives

then it's planting time!

If you're not ready yet, don't fret, just go step by step. The next month or so is prime time for planting these. And after that, they will still grow, but will typically finish their life cycle very quickly and not produce as much.

On the other hand, if you're only planting late-spring things this year, you have to wait.  Sorry, the late spring vegetables will all die if you plant them outside now!

If you haven't already bought your supplies, including seeds, obviously you need to do that now. 

And you can watch the weather forecast, and try to seize a good day when we get one. Light showers are okay, but heavy rain will usually make the soil too muddy for planting for a day or two afterward.

When it's time to plant, you should also get your drawing of your layout, which you stored somewhere safe after making it a few weeks ago.

One more thing: this is another very detailed post, trying to help out people who are really unsure how to plant things. I am happy to say that after this, the posts will generally be much shorter, since much less detail will be needed. (I like to write, but trying to say everything has been a bit grueling! And I'm sure I've forgotten things, at that. Please let me know in the comments about things you find unclear or confusing.)


Soak peas overnight before you plant them.

If you are growing peas, it's best to soak them in water at room temperature for about 24 hours beforehand. Before they start to grow, they need to soak up a lot of water. That happens only very slowly in the soil if you plant them dry, so it will take longer for them to sprout. The cool soil temperatures also make germination slow. If you forget to soak them the evening before you plant, soaking them for even a few hours before you plant them is better than nothing.

Now, even if you plant them dry, they will eventually sprout, so you could just ignore this advice. On the other hand, if you do soak them, you really need to plant them within about 24 hours, or they will start to sprout before you plant them and the sprouts will be very easily damaged when you handle them to plant them.

Also remember that your peas will be planted about 3 cm apart, in a row, or in a circle around some supporting structure, so try to only soak the amount you will need. Extra seeds can be kept until next year, as long as they stay very dry. Any peas that you soak will have to be planted or thrown away.


Preparing the Soil

Every time you plant in any area, dig in plenty of compost with your trowel, right where you are going plant the seeds. This is the only reason you can plant so intensively: because you are constantly adding rich organic matter back into the soil.

(Note: if you just filled new containers with compost and soil, or just prepared new ground by single- or double-digging in lots of compost, then just this one time, you don't have to dig in any more compost. But next time you plant there, you will have to add compost!)

To prepare to plant, first, spread an inch or so of compost over the area you are going to plant. Then, using your trowel, break up the earth where you are planting and mix it well with the compost. Mix as deep as you can with the trowel. The deeper the loose the soil is, the easier it will be for your plants to form healthy root systems. Try to break up most of the obvious lumps of soil, and generally remove stones that are bigger than 1 cm or so.

If I'm planting stuff that goes close together filling an area, like arugula, then I prepare the whole area all at once (as I described above). If I'm planting stuff that will go in a row, like peas along a fence, I prepare just the narrow row, still mixing in the compost as deep as I can go with the trowel. If I'm planting individual seedlings that I bought in pots, then I prepare just the hole where I'm going to plant the seedling. The idea here is to avoid cultivating too much area that you aren't planting anything in. If you do that, you will encourage weeds to grow. Disturbing the soil causes weed seeds to start growing, and putting in compost there will feed them. So you can be strategic when you prepare for planting, and try to cultivate and compost just where you need to.


Planting Tiny Seeds

Mizuna, arugula, and mustard greens all have extremely tiny seeds. Traditionally they are scattered ("broadcast"), but this makes them grow irregularly and too close to each other, so they have to be thinned later, which is quite laborious. It's also a waste of seed. And if you don't get around to thinning them, they will compete with each other and stay small and spindly. Furthermore, it's harder to weed them when they are irregularly spaced: for one thing, you can't see as clearly which ones are the weeds and which are the vegetable plants. That's even harder if you are planting something for the first time and you don't even know what its seedlings will look like!

So though it's tricky to plant them one at a time at a regular, optimal spacing, it is actually easier in the long run.

When planting very tiny small seeds, after the compost is dug in, I use the trowel to try to level out the soil a bit. Then I make shallow, narrow trenches in the soil - maybe about 1 or 2 cm deep. I make these parallel so the bottoms of the trenches are the recommended distance apart for the plants.  (Say, 5 cm apart for arugula. See the table at the bottom of this post for other distances.)  Then I take a small amount of seeds in the palm of my hand, and pick them up one at a time, and try to drop them in the trenches, again spaced out at the recommended distance. (I'm not terribly patient, so the actual spacing is definitely somewhat random. Often I drop more than one at a time just by accident.)

Last, I use the trowel to just slightly cover the seeds in the trenches. With very tiny seeds, you should not cover them deeply: no more than a millimetre or so of soil - just enough to keep some moisture around the seed. (Also this hides the seeds a bit from birds that might come poking around. The seed-eaters - sparrows, etc. - are looking for leftover weed seeds at this time of year.) Since you didn't really fill them in, the little trenches will still be present, and those will also help you to see where to water - which is the next step.

Ideally, you water very, very lightly, from very very low to the ground. If you water heavily onto the soil, you will really pack down the soil on your seeds, and as that dries it will become quite hard, making it harder for the seeds to grow. I put my hand close to the soil over the trench, and pour water from a container into the palm of my hand and let it drip through my fingers as I move along the trench.

Once the plants start to get a few inches tall, you can become gradually less careful - you can just pour water gently on the roots (avoiding dumping it on the plants themselves).


Larger Seeds; Rows and Groups

Larger seeds need to be buried deeper when you plant them. Seed packages will usually recommend a depth. But a simple rule of thumb is to plant seeds at about their own depth or a slightly more: for example, a pea is about 1/4 inch in diameter, so plant it about 1/4 inch under the surface, or slightly more. (In softer, looser soil, you can go slightly deeper, because the seed will be able to push up easily.)

The above section about small seeds assumes you are "area planting" - filling up an area with plants in a grid at the optimal spacing. On the other hand, if you are planting climbers like peas in a row along a fence, then you just make one trench, and then you leave some extra space between that trench and other plants.

The same goes for plants in a group, such as peas planted around a central climbing support (like a teepee of sticks). The peas in that case would be planted in a circular trench, and then you'd leave a little extra room around that circle before planting other things around it.


Spacings for Early Spring Vegetables

	Height	Planting Time	Spacing
Peas	climber	early spring	close row or group (3cm)
Mustard Greens	tall (1m)	early spring	close (5cm)
Mizuna	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Arugula	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Chicory	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Chard	low	early spring	med (8cm)
Chives	low	early spring	close group (1cm)

Preparing the Plot

(This post assumes you've worked through the previous posts first: Choose Your Plot, Choose Your Vegetables and Stuff You Need.)

Well, the weather is looking up again. Now you need to watch the weather and seize on a good time to prepare your garden plot.

If you are planting early spring vegetables, it's definitely high time to get your plot ready.  Peas and greens like arugula need to be planted soon to mature in the cool weather they prefer. See the Choose Your Vegetables post if you are unsure which vegetables are early spring ones. If you're only planting warm weather vegetables in late spring, you still have a month or two to get your plot ready. Otherwise...

Get your gloves on, grab your trowel and your other supplies (compost, containers, potting soil, etc.).

Preparing Pots and Containers

Do this work in the area you are actually going to grow in, because big containers will be quite heavy once you water them. But you can fill the containers in a different spot as long as you move them into their final position before you water them.

To make clean-up easier, spread out quite a bit of newspaper around where you are going to fill your containers. For me, at least, potting soil always seems to spread out everywhere, no matter how hard I try not to spill it.

This is your last chance to make sure all the containers have ample drainage holes! Punch holes in the bottom if they don't already have them. I mentioned this before, but I should emphasize again that it's essential to prevent your plants from dying of root rot. Even if they're not exposed to rain, you could very easily water too much without realizing it. And, as I also mentioned before, if the containers are in an area where you don't want leakage on the floor, then you need to have something under them to catch it.

Fill each container about 7/8 full of potting soil, and about 1/8 full of compost. (Okay, that's a very rough proportion - I really have no idea how much compost my plants get!) Fill the container very full, because this soil mix will quickly compress down a lot as it gets watered, and also as the organic material in the soil decomposes to feed your plants.

Mix the soil and compost thoroughly together. Move the containers into their final position, with no newspaper underneath. (You won't be able to get the newspaper out from under large containers they get heavy.)

This is not planting day, but you should water the containers now anyway. Potting soil behaves strangely until it's been wet for a while - it tends to be too "fluffy" to plant in. So by wetting it now, you will make it easier to work with when planting. Water until you think the soil is damp all the way down, but avoid making the soil sopping wet.

Using an Existing Garden Patch

If you are going to plant in ornamental landscaping that's already got stuff growing in it, or if you are going to plant somewhere that's been cultivated before, you just have to clean up your vegetable growing area now.

Go check out the spot. Make sure there's no snow and ice left, but the last of that probably melted last week.

If this is going to be a dedicated garden patch (rather than planting among other existing plants), it might be a good idea to consider your approach. Dig into the soil a bit with the trowel.

The soil should be pretty lose and easy to dig, not hard packed or densely full of roots from grass or trees. Some weeds are not a problem at all. Earthworms are a good sign: they both improve the soil and prefer to live in healthy soil. If the patch is very wet and muddy right now, that makes it a little hard to tell. Good soil will stick to your shovel a lot if it's very wet, but if it's only moist, it will crumble easily. On the other hand, if it's very sandy or gravelly, that's not good either.

If any of this puts you in doubt, you can consider if you want to do the hard work of shallow or deep preparation described below under "Creating a New Plot". That's a lot more work, but compacted, clayey soil, or sandy, gravelly soil, are not so great for vegetables - the plants will not be able to create as strong root systems and the soil will not hold moisture as evenly, so the plants will experience more severe wet/dry fluctuations, and the soil will probably also be effectively less nutritious because soil organisms will not be thriving either.

If you've planned to remove some existing ornamental plants, remove them now to make room for your vegetables now. You can transplant them somewhere else if they're nice and you want to keep them. In that case, try to dig out a large enough root ball of soil so that you don't damage the roots too much. Then just dig a new hole, and try to get the plants in at the same level they were before, or just slightly lower (so that rainwater will tend to flow in towards the roots).

Remove old dead growth left over from last year's plants that's in the way, and dig up any perennial weeds that are growing. Try to get the roots of the weeds out. Any roots or pieces of roots that look firm and healthy will start to grow soon. If there are dandelions with new leaves, you can eat the greens in a sandwich or salad - as long as you know they are dandelions. (Please don't poison yourself.) Some other weeds are tasty too, but that's beyond the scope of this blog: foraging is another topic - though a great one. I do eat my edible weeds.

Or if it's an area with some kind of "mulch", e.g. something covering the soil like wood chips or plastic, you need to remove that from the area you are going to plant in.

You are done when you should have a pretty clear patch (or patches) of soil to plant in.

Creating a New Plot

If you are planting in a patch of lawn, or somewhere else that has not been cultivated before, now you have the hardest work to do: the shovel work.

To prepare new ground, you want to loosen the soil and mix in compost as deeply as possible, which means as deeply as you have the energy for.  If you've kept yourself to a small patch, that will be a big help now.

One note: you should make sure your soil is ready for this work. There is a standard planting phrase "as soon as the soil can be worked". When the snow has just come off, the soil will still be partly frozen. After that, it will be very "waterlogged" for a while. Just after heavy rain is no good either. In that very wet state, it's almost impossible to dig and prepare, because it just forms huge, heavy, muddy lumps on the shovel. You will suffer unnecessarily if you try to garden then!

The soil is only ready to "work" when it has thawed and drained enough so that doesn't happen very much. (But your soil might still be pretty heavy and sticky if it's very compacted, high in clay, and doesn't have much organic matter in it. That's why we need to "prepare" it.) So before you get going, check with your trowel, and see if the soil is still frozen or in a very wet, muddy mass. If lumps tend to crumble at least a bit when you squish them with the trowel, then the soil "can be worked", and you can begin. If it's still too wet, you have to wait a few days, and try again.

In preparing the soil, what we are going for is loose, aerated soil full of organic matter that keeps it from clumping up again. That will be the kind of soil that is makes it easy for plants to grow roots, that holds lots of water without getting waterlogged, is immediately nutritious for plants, and also supports lots of soil organisms that are the real long-term source of released nutrients for your plants. Also, well-prepared soil is ready earlier the following years, because the higher amounts of organic matter make it behave better when wet.

Once you've prepared a bed, try never to walk on it again. That will keep it uncompacted. Make sure your bed is small enough to reach in comfortably from the sides - no more than 2 feet away from a path in any direction (so maximum 4 feet between paths), and less is better. (Less sore back is better, to be precise.) If your planting area is too large for this, then add more paths to cut it into smaller, more reachable pieces.

If you never walk on the prepared soil, and you always add more compost each time you plant, you will not need to do this heavy work again. Earthworms and the roots of plants will together keep your soil deeply aerated and uncompacted. 

Shallow Preparation:

I'll talk about the easier, shallower way first. This way is less work, but shallower, so the result will be less supportive of more deep-rooted vegetables like tomatoes, chard, and beans.

If you are removing existing lawn, you probably should do deep preparation. And generally, I'd say do deep preparation if you are physically capable of doing it. It's a one-time thing, after all.

Remove any weeds from the surface. Now start digging up the soil and stirring it around as deep as your shovel blade goes, looking for masses of living roots you find. Remove those and put them aside. They are strong healthy future weeds you most likely don't want.

Once your patch is very stirred up, spread lots of compost on top - ideally you will have enough compost to form a layer on the surface that is a few inches deep. Now continue stirring up the soil with your shovel, mixing it very well with the compost and breaking up all the remaining lumps of packed soil.

The deeper you stir it up, the better.


Deep Preparation:

The deep way to prepare the soil is called "double digging". It goes two shovel-lengths deep (instead of one shovel deep, like the shallow preparation described above). Lots of vegetables (tomatoes, beans, chard, etc.) prefer to root deeper than one shovel depth, so this is definitely worth the effort if you can manage it.

But the basic idea is still just that you want to mix in compost and loosen the soil as far down as you can go.

If you are digging in a grassy area, see the section below about dealing with grass.

If your plot is very small (say 1 metre by 1 metre), you may just want to remove the whole top "1 shovel deep" layer of soil, piling it all to the side. Then prepare the entire bottom layer all at once, mixing in compost and breaking up lumps as deep as you can go with the shovel. Try to leave it loose and fine. Then put the entire top layer back, and mix compost into that as deep as you can go with the shovel, again breaking up all the lumps and leaving it loose and fine.

For somewhat larger areas, double digging is a clever approach designed to work the soil down to two shovel-depths deep, while minimizing how much you actually have to move the soil around. This is done by proceeding in strips, so you don't have to remove the entire top layer of soil at once.

First you remove soil from a trench that is one full shovel depth deep. (It's helpful to have a plastic sheet to put this soil on, or a wheelbarrow, or some kind of bin, just to reduce the mess and make it easier to recover this soil at the end of the process.) Then you work the bottom of the trench, the deep layer. Mix compost into the soil at the bottom of the trench with your shovel, mixing it and losening it well, going as deep as you can - another full shovel depth. Ideally, you have enough compost to mix in a layer that's a few inches deep.

Next you start a new trench beside the original one, moving the top layer of soil over, to fill in the first trench. Then you add more compost to this top layer of soil in the first trench and loosen it well.

The first trench is done, and now you are standing in the second trench. Now you work compost deep into the bottom of the second trench. Then you dig a third trench, to fill in the top layer of the second trench and mix that with compost, and so on.

You fill in the last trench with the soil you set aside from the first one.

Need help visualizing that? The wikipedia entry on double digging includes an animated illustration that makes this quite clear.  However, they show mixing the top layers at the end, which would require walking on the prepared soil - which you should not do. I suggest mixing each top layer while you are standing in the next (unprepared) trench.

The advantage of this whole trench-by-trench double-dig approach is simply that most of the soil that is moved is just moved a little ways - from a new trench to the previous trench beside it, instead of, say, putting the whole top layer aside at once. The objective is still just to loosen the soil and add compost as far down as possible.

Dealing with Grass

If you are digging where there's solid grass, you should probably double dig. And as you go, you need to do one extra (hard) thing: from each trench, cut away the turf, the layer of grass including its whole root layer, with the shovel and set it aside.

After you prepare the bottom layer of each trench (after it's all mixed with compost and loosened), put the turf from that trench back in, grass-side down (i.e. upside down), before the rest of the topsoil from the next trench goes on top.  That puts the grass in deep, where it won't be able to grow anymore, and where it will decompose and further enrich your soil.

(Now that you're reading this, you may want to contemplate "keep it small" for a while. Did you keep it small enough? If not, this is a good time to adjust your plans!)

Getting Toronto City Compost

The City of Toronto starts up 2011 ward Environment Days (various Saturdays and Sundays throughout the growing season), and regional compost depots on Saturdays in 5 locations soon, beginning on April 2.

City compost is free for residents, up to 1 cubic metre - which should be enough to last a few years for most of us. I never have seen anybody measuring, so if you're not planning to become a reseller or anything, you can probably take whatever you need for your own use.

You can pick up compost at Environment Day locations and at the compost depots. Here are links to the city's pages showing the schedules for 2011:

• Environment days  
• Saturday compost pick-up depots.

Make sure to bring your own containers and a shovel or smaller container to scoop with!

I have used city compost for years. Despite a sensational Toronto Star expose of bad composting industry practices a few years ago, my plants have always thrived in it. After the Star's article, the province of Ontario added stricter regulations on industrial composting practices, so in any case, compost quality issues are probably less likely now.

However, for those extremely concerned about environmental purity, I would suggest buying organic compost. (Or possibly moving out of the city or to a different planet, sadly.)

Change of Plans

I had the post on preparing your garden plot ready for this week, but your garden plot, or balcony, or whatever is most likely buried and/or frozen like mine. The ground, in particular, is quite likely to be frozen solid, with such low night temperatures and low daytime temperatures.

That's okay. I started these posts early in the season so that there'd be room to work around the usual Toronto spring ups and downs. If you're not caught up on the preparations in the previous posts, this is a good weekend to do it.


For my part, this week I've collected together some Toronto gardening sites, in case you want to browse.

All of these sites are inspiring examples of urban growing, but be sure not to let the scale intimidate you. These are people who can respect growing a bucket of tomatoes on a balcony or fire escape or some chard outside the back door.


You Grow Girl is a great site for shedding misconceptions about gardening, and seeing lots of examples (and photos) of gardening for food and beauty in small, unconventional, and public urban spaces. There are discussion lists where you can ask questions and share ideas, too.

Gardening by yourself is very nice, but community is great too.  If you want to garden with others, learn, or if you don't have much space to garden and you want to do more, Toronto is full of gardens to help out in. The list of gardens at Toronto Community Garden Network is enormous, spread out all over the city.

For example, Perth Dupont Community Garden has both individual garden plots and lots of shared growing projects, including a garden from which they donate produce to the Stop Community Food Centre.

On the other hand, Dufferin Grove has no individual garden plots, but a large garden maintained by volunteers and park staff. Produce is used in the park's great home-made food.

At U of T the Dig In! Campus Agriculture Network has a blog that follows food issues and events, often including public workshops. They have a rooftop farm, the sky garden, with its own blog.

Interlude

It's a good time for the Interlude/Pause. So where are we at now? The posts we've had so far:

• Choose your plot (or location in pots, containers, flower beds, etc.)

• Choose your vegetables and plan the layout

• Buy supplies

And to give you a sense of where things are going, the  next steps will be:

• Prepare your plot - pots, containers, soil, etc

• Plant early spring vegetables

Feeling behind? Don't worry, there's not really any big hurry.

The early spring stuff can be planted pretty optimally for a long time. Often people plant them gradually over the next few months to spread out the harvest, anyway.

So just go through the steps at your own pace.

Have questions, or are there parts you don't understand? Let me know in the comments and I'll try to help, and I'll also go back and clarify postings that are confusing so other people get the benefit.

Stuff You Need

(This post assumes you've read Choose Your Plot and Choose Your Vegetables first!)

Well, yet more snow today, but the time when we can get down to work is coming soon - just a few weeks give or take, depending on the weather.

We'll prepare the soil in your containers or garden plot, and after that it will be time to plant things like peas, arugula, chard, etc.

But for now, you'll need to make sure you have some supplies. You don't need very much (gardening is not an equipment sport), but there are some inexpensive things you need.

1. Gloves

Getting your hands in the soil is romantic, but unless you want to spend more time scrubbing dirt off them than you do gardening, you need gloves.

For gardening, don't buy gloves made of knit material: too much dirt goes right through the knit. Cotton cloth is nice because you can rinse them out a bit outside, and then take them in and throw them in the wash.

2. Trowel

You definitely need something to dig and cultivate with. An ordinary garden trowel is good, as long as it's strong - you'd be surprised at how hard you crank on the trowel sometimes.  So look carefully at what you are buying, and try to choose something strong, unless you want to buy another one again soon.

A basic, sturdy trowel is all you really need for basic gardening.

On the other hand, I do love my Korean "homi", which has a longer, narrower blade set at right-angles to the handle. It's great for preparing soil and planting, but it's not as good for digging holes or moving any amount of dirt around, so it doesn't substitute for a trowel. I use both. But just a trowel alone is definitely enough.

3. Compost

Compost is nicely decayed organic matter.  It is odourless, and basically looks like light, crumbly, loose, black dirt.

Compost is the original garden black magic, and you want lots of it in your soil, for many, many reasons. It keeps the soil from clumping and packing into hard clay chunks (which are very bad). It retains moisture that would otherwise drain away, so plants don't dry out as quickly, while at the same time it also retains air-pockets needed by the micro-organisms in the soil that provide you plants with the nutrients they need. And it feeds the soil organisms and your plants.

So you must have compost, lots if it. It is the main easy in easy gardening. Every time you plant anything, you put more compost into your soil.

How much do you need?  If you're keeping things as small as I've recommended (a square metre or two), then one large bag should be plenty - and a smaller bag should be okay if you're going really small, like just a few smaller containers. Up to a point, more is better. All the vegetables on the short list will be happy with lots: for example, 25% compost, 75% soil would be just fine.

Toronto city compost is free for gardeners, but you have to pick it up yourself. Soon, the Toronto neighborhood environment days will start up, where you can get yourself bins or bags full of compost for free - your own food coming back to you full circle as black earth magic, isn't that beautiful? But an environment day event in your area might come too late for you if you're starting with early spring greens, so check the schedule, and if necessary, buy a bag of compost now, and pick up more when there's a conveniently located environment day even near you.

4. Seeds

Hopefully you've already decided what you are going to grow, so you can buy seeds now. If you haven't quite decided, I suggest going back to the posting on planning your plot, and working that out soon!

Personally, I mostly buy from Urban Harvest in Toronto, because they are at my local market and also have a store not too far away from me (on Sorauren), and the people are generally friendly and knowledgeable, and they carry only organic, open-pollinated seeds, which also means you can keep seed from most varieties to use next year. Also, talking with someone who knows the varieites is very helpful when trying to choose which type to grow. But there are also lots of other choices of seeds at garden centers everywhere.  Don't sweat it too much.

For some plants, it is often more practical to buy them as seedlings. On our shortlist, tomatoes, basil, chives, and nasturtiums are all good candidates for this approach.

Tomatoes are usually started very early indoors so they have a good start by the time it gets warm enough outside for them. Basil, chives, and nasturtiums are the other things from the shortlist that you might want to buy as seedlings. Chives you will only ever need to buy once anyway, because they are perennial, and when your first clump gets larger, it can be split up into many.  Usually one or two nasturtiums are all you need, too, because they spread quite vigorously to cover a large area.

If you're only going to plant a few of those, or if you have more money than time, or you just definitely want to keep this easy, I suggest just buying the potted seedlings later, right when it's time to plant them out in May.

So don't buy seeds for the plants you are going to buy as seedlings.

On the other hand, in this blog I will cover how (and when) to start those indoors from seed, so you can do that if you want to. I will cover that (next month) because I do it myself, but be warned that we're straying out of easy territory there, and the results I get at home are nearly always smaller and weaker than the seedlings grown by experts with greenhouses. I just like to do it. Okay, I'm also cheap.

5. Shovel - optional

A full sized shovel is occasionally helpful, but it's only absolutely necessary on one very rare occasion: when you dig a completely new area of garden patch.  So if that's what you're going to be doing, you should borrow a shovel or buy one, because it's almost time to start digging.

6. Containers and Potting Soil - optional

If you're planting on a balcony or patio, you'll need your containers and soil. Whatever the containers are, make them deep, and make sure they have drainage.

The main problems with containers are the extremes: they can easily dry out too fast, or they can get too waterlogged. So they should be very deep to hold lots of soil (and thus retain lots of water), but they must also have plenty of drainage in the bottom so that too much water doesn't just fill them up.

If you're using something that doesn't have holes, you need to add them.  A drill would probably be the best way, though a hammer and a nail might work for some things. (So add borrowing a drill to your list if you're in this situation and you don't have one.)

Drainage also means you need to have something for under the containers if they're in a place where the runoff has to be controlled. Water that leaks from the bottom of the pot will be somewhat dirty. Commercially made plant pots usually come with drainage dishes, or you can place a pot that has drain holes within an outer container that doesn't - which is both decorative, and good for your plants, since it will add protection from heat and cold for the roots.

The soil can be any potting soil (which will be light and absorbent, generally), but I'd suggest going for something certified organic, since it's anybody's guess what might be in the unregulated products intended for ordinary house plants.

7. Climbing Support - optional

If you are planting peas, or later tomatoes or climbing beans, they'll all need to climb or be supported. The easiest is to plant against a fence, but lots of things will work, as long as it's tall enough - 4 or 5 feet at least - and strong enough not to fall over: tomato plants and beans in particular get pretty heavy.

Garden centres have lots of things for this, like purpose-made stakes, "tomato cages", bamboo poles, or wooden lattice. If you already have a wall or fence but it's not readily climable, just hanging many twine strings from it is enough for peas and beans to climb. Tomatoes you'll have to tie up more.

I know I say this a lot, but don't worry too much. Try something, and if it doesn't work... just try something else.


Where to Get Things

You can get everything listed here at a garden centre or any hardware store.

Seeds are also in most grocery stores, too. And seeds, and later seedlings, will be for sale at local farmers markets too. (As mentioned above, I usually get mine from Urban Harvest - they are always at my local farmers market, and they are organic, and they are local, and they have an incredible selection of seeds and seedlings, and they are nice. But there are other good seed people around, too.)

Choose Your Vegetables

I'm assuming you read the last blog entry: Choose Your Plot. So hopefully you've already decided (more or less) on what garden area or containers you are going to grow in. Now it's time to decide what to plant and how to fit it in to your garden.

Here is the shortlist of easy-to-grow and tasty vegetables: 

Early spring planting:

• Mizuna
• Arugula
• Mustard Greens
• Chicory
• Chard
• Peas
• Chives

Late spring planting:

• Climbing Beans
• Bush Beans
• Cherry Tomatoes
• Basil
• Nasturtiums

Some may be unfamiliar. (A few of them are rarely, if ever, sold commercially.) You can read more about them on the short list page, or look them up elsewhere if you're unsure.

The next task is to choose which ones to grow and plan how they are going to fit in your space. We don't have to figure out the exact details in advance, but we do have to figure out the general layout. A rough plan on paper helps because:

• Some plants need to be planted early (they grow well in cool weather), and some plants need to be planted later (they can't tolerate cold weather).
• Some plants grow tall and will shade out smaller plants unless they are positioned behind them relative to the sun.
• Some plants take up a lot of room, and will leave no room for anything else if you plant too much of them!

So all that takes a little bit of working out. Maybe you'll need as much as an hour to piece this all together the first time.

Once we have a rough plan, we can be pretty relaxed. The plan ensures we know what will fit where, in your containers or your area of earth, so that we don't buy seeds or seedlings we might not have room for.

1. To start with, list the vegetables from the short list that you really want to grow. Or if you're growing something else that's not on the list, put that down. Substitutions are fine with me, as long as you don't mind doing some figuring out for them on your own! You can let me know in the comments what you're growing, and I'll help out if I can.

Most of all remember that one of our guiding principles is: only grow what you really want to grow. See the How We Keep It Simple page for the zucchini story if you need to be reminded why.

2. Now sketch your containers or garden patch on a piece of paper or in a notebook, with some rough indication of the size of the containers or plot. For containers, try to make the positions of the containers relative to each other fairly accurate on the diagram. That's because we have to plan for light and shade with taller plants and shorter plants.

Is it clear to you which direction the main daytime sun will be coming from? Where most of your sun will be coming from depends on where you are planting: for example if you're on a west-facing balcony, most of the sun will probably be coming from the south-west diagonal. In a wide open area, the strongest sun will be coming from the south.

Once you've figured this out, indicate the main direction of day time sun on the diagram. If you're having trouble with this, it will probably help to go out to the location and look at the situation from right there. This doesn't have to be extremely precise, but should be mostly right so you can position your tall and short plants in such a way that the tall ones won't shade out the short ones.

Next we will lay out the plants in the sketch.

3. Position the climbers first.

Sketch out the areas of your plot or containers that will contain the climbers. The climbing plants from the short list are peas, cherry tomatoes, and climbing beans.

If you are growing climbing plants (which need some kind of tall support), they have to be in a place where they won't shade out the other ones. That is, they need to be behind the other plants, from the point of view of the daytime sun, which hopefully you already drew on your diagram.

Peas and beans are planted quite close together (a few inches apart) in a row or group where they will climb the support you provide: a fence, or very tall strong stakes and strings.

Cherry tomatoes are planted individually, further apart - at least 6 inches apart, or one per pot. They will also need strong, tall support.

Using those distances, figure out approximately how many plants you will have of each type.

4. Now fill in the self-supporting plants. These rest of the plants in our list support themselves, so they are just planted to fill an area at their preferred spacing, like dots in a grid. But some of them can be planted closer together than others.

So what you do now is sketch out the areas of your plot or containers that will contain each of these plants.

There's lots of factors you can consider when you decide to lay these ones out. It's a bit harder to plant the late spring plants behind early spring plants, for one thing (because the early spring ones will be in place and growing already). For another placement example, I pick spring greens often (like whenever I make a sandwich), so for me it's nice if they're near the edge, very easy to reach.

Here is a table to help summarize the planting needs of each plant. Still, don't worry about it too much. Plants are not perfectionists.

	Height	Planting Time	Spacing
Peas	climber	early spring	close row or group (3cm)
Climbing Beans	climber	late spring	close row or group (5cm)
Cherry Tomatoes	climber	late spring	wide (15cm)
Mustard Greens	tall (1m)	early spring	close (5cm)
Basil	tall (1m)	late spring	med (10cm)
Mizuna	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Arugula	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Chicory	low	early spring	close (5cm)
Chard	low	early spring	med (8cm)
Chives	low	early spring	close group (1cm)
Bush Beans	low	late spring	med (10cm)
Nasturtium	low	late spring	close group (3cm)

Basil and mustard greens are both quite tall, so you should consider the shade issue again - they should be behind any lower plants (from the point of view of the sun), so they don't shade shorter plants. Basil is traditionally grown beside the tomatoes to ward off tomato pests. Basil and mustard greens should both be planted to fill their areas at spacings of about 4 to 6 inches apart.

Some of the greens - arugula, mizuna, and chicory - are grown very close together in their area, about 2 - 3 inches apart.

Bush beans and chard need a bit more space: they should fill their area at 4 to 6 inches apart.

Nasturtiums and chives will both eventually form bigger clumps, so you just need to find one spot or a few spots for each of these, with some space around for them to spread into.

As you sketch in where each of your vegetables will go, also note down approximately how many of each plant will fit into that space you've allotted.

5. Don't worry. Sure, it can get complicated and confusing, but it doesn't matter that much. Believe me, stuff will grow and it will taste good. So let's just keep this fun and interesting and low stress! That's why we call this "side plot", and not "melodrama" or "tragicomedy".

6. Keep your list somewhere safe. No, no, it's not secret, you don't have to hide it. Just don't lose it, that's all I'm saying.

Choose Your Plot

Where to Grow?

Winter may still be hard upon us, but spring is getting closer with each mild day.

Your task now is to choose your garden plot - or your pots, containers, buckets, or wherever you are going to grow. There are lots of options. Furthermore, small is good: a few big pots or a planting container can make a great garden.

Maybe you already have a place, or maybe you already have a place in mind. Still, it might be worth giving it another think.

By the way, despite the weather, make sure to go out and actually look at the spot while you are thinking about it. It's much easier to visualize things if you are right there. If the spot is still completely buried in snow, it might be a good idea to take a snow shovel or something and clear it a bit, so you can see.

When it comes to choosing a spot, here are the key points, in order of importance:

1. Keep it small!  Keep it small!  Keep it small!

We're aiming for total manageability, and zero intimidation/procrastination. So how small is small? I suggest trying for something like 1 metre by 1 meter, or maybe 1 metre by 2 metres.

That probably sounds pretty small. But you can actually grow quite a lot in that, and it will be way better to do a small patch successfully than to have trouble keeping up with a larger patch and then get discouraged. Unless you have a lot of time and you are a really good follow-through person, you probably don't need to go any bigger than that your first time around.

But you could go even smaller. One or two deep pots or buckets, or one deep planter, or one sunny corner of your flower bed - a little spot can be fun and easy.

To me, small, intense, organic vegetable gardens are the most beautiful gardens of all, a profound alignment of human thought and effort with the complex natural systems to which we belong.

2. Lots of sun is important.  

When you're thinking about where to plant, think about how the sun moves during the day and as the seasons change. (But remember, as you look now, that the sun will be much higher in a few months.)

Most vegetables will do fine as long they get at least 4 or 5 hours of full (unshaded) sun between 10 am and 4 pm. More is better, but that is usually enough. Note that sunshine early or late in the day is not as powerful.

You can get clever with some things: for example, spring greens can be planted early and start growing before the leaves are on the trees, and once established will do fine in a spot that gets somewhat less sun after the leaves come on the trees.

Also remember that on the Toronto street plan, an "east" exposure is really north-east, and so an east balcony won't get very much sun - though people sometimes make it work. A Toronto "west" exposure is really south-west, and will be just fine for growing - but you'll have to keep up on the watering, because it gets very hot on that side: pots and containers in particular will dry out very fast.

3. Grow your garden close at hand.  

The best place to grow is somewhere you will see, be in, or pass by often. This has two benefits. Your garden stays present in mind because you see it all the time, so you remember to do the watering, weeding, or whatever needs to be done next. And you also get more pleasure and satisfaction because you notice it more.

It's really, really worth doing a little extra work at the beginning to make this principle work for you. For example, if you are growing on a balcony, try to position the plants so they'll be very visible from where you sit inside. Raise them up on crates or bricks if that helps. If you live in a house, consider planting your vegetables in the front landscaping that you pass by whenever you come and go, instead of in the back garden (if you don't use the back very much). These days, chard in the landscaping is all the rage, so you can be both convenient and stylish that way.

4. Climbing room for vine plants is ideal.  

Peas, climbing beans, tomatoes and cucumbers, among others, need to be or do best grown as vines on tall supports. Growing against a south-facing or west-facing wall or tall fence will be great, if you have that option. Otherwise, to grow climbers you will need to provide some structure for them to climb, and it needs to be tall and somewhat strong and stable, so it doesn't fall over in a wind or just from the weight of the plants (which get pretty heavy as they grow).

5. Containers or pots should be deep and wide, and must have drainage holes.

This is one aspect in which bigger is actually better. Soil in bigger containers will dry out much more slowly than small ones, and will go through less extreme heat fluctuations as well. And depth is also important, so that deep-rooted plants have lots of room to expand their root systems. Big, foodsafe plastic buckets are a good size and material, but lots of other things will do fine - commercial pots, or whatever you think is good. (But toxic materials: not so good!)

No matter what you use, drainage holes in the bottom are necessary to avoid drowning or rotting your plants' roots. You will probably need to put your own holes in containers that aren't already meant for growing plants in.

Drainage also means you will need some kind of underlying dish or outer pot to capture runoff, if you need to keep your growing area dry, neat, or picturesque. Actually, an outer pot is good for another reason: it's an extra buffer to reduce extreme summer heat that will stress your plants and dry out the soil fast.

6. Easy Access

Accessibility really matters.  I mean, it really matters. You need to be able to reach all parts of the garden without straining too much, or you'll seize up your back, neck, or hips - and that will probably be the end of your garden!

You also need to be able to reach only from the edges without stepping on the dirt. Compacted soil is very poor for growing in, so try never to step on your planting dirt, even out of season.

Typically for garden patches, this means they can't be bigger than 3 or 4 feet in any direction, with access from all sides so you can reach the whole patch easily. In a larger garden area, you put pathways in to make a number of smaller patches. But if you are following principle number 1 above, you are keeping it small, so that won't be necessary.

7. Preparing new ground is the hardest work.

One last issue might be considering the work to prepare new ground. If you're thinking of turning some existing lawn or a heavily overgrown area that hasn't been gardened recently into a garden patch, that's probably going to be some hard work with a shovel.

If you have an easier option, maybe that's better. Still, if you are following principle number 1 and keeping things small, it won't be too bad, as long as you are physically capable of some hard digging - or you have an able and willing helper for that part.


A Note About Soil Quality

Generally, I wouldn't worry too much about soil quality. Gardening books will often talk about soil quality and soil testing. But soil is easy to improve on a small scale - another advantage of keeping it small. (Not so easy on a huge farm.)  Using lots of compost is the main thing. I'll talk about a few things that help improve soil, especially in the long term, when we get to the soil preparation step.

However, do make sure your soil is not outright poisonous. Plants are what they eat, too. If you're on old industrial land, this is an important point. Toronto has some very contaminated old industrial areas. If you're in doubt about your location, I recommend growing your vegetables in containers with organic soil you buy. Or get your soil tested in that case, if you want to know for sure.

Summing it all up, in order of importance:

• Keep it small!
• Lots of sun.  
• Close at hand.  
• Vine plants need climbing room (tomatoes, beans, peas).  
• Containers or pots should be deep and wide.
• Easy access to work on all parts of the garden.
• Creating a brand new garden patch is hard shovel work.

So now go ahead and choose your plot.

And remember,  most of all, keep it small! If that drives you crazy, I promise to let you have more next year. Fair?

Next week we'll go through choosing your vegetables and planning the layout.