Munching on the first edible-pod peas from my garden is a wonderfully poetic way to commemorate this first day of spring!  What great timing!  We’ve been enjoying lettuce and bok choy and tatsoi and chard and kale greens for a month, but these are the first peas. 
​     If you haven’t begun to enjoy cool-season veggie harvests, you can celebrate this official transition to spring by sowing your peas and transplanting the six-pack or 4” veggie plants you purchase from your local vendor or start yourself from seed! 
    Even with our continuing wintery weather including some threat of frost and snow with the current storm this week, our longer daytime days bode for increasingly warm days in the garden.  
 
Weird Weather
     In past years, March was our transition time in the garden, suitable for planting both ways -- the last of the cool-season lovers (to give them time to mature and provide harvests before the too-hot summer heat made them go to seed and become inedible), and also the first of the warm-season lovers (in case the weather did indeed warm up quickly enough to warm the soil and enable plants to get an early start on harvests).    
     However, this year is definitely different, starting with this still-winter chill and so very much rain and even snow in our local mountains.  I used to feel that we’d had our winter if I could see one day of a minimal dusting of snow on our mountains.  This year, there’re still a few stripes of white up there, weeks after. 
     So it appears that our transition time may be April, this time around.  While we can put in more tomato plants now, we should wait a month or so before planting other summer-weather delights like cucumbers, eggplants, melons, peppers and squash.  Tomatoes can thrive in the still-cold soil, but the others just sit there and pout, admonishing you that you stuck them into the refrigerator.  Worse, they take way longer to recuperate, establish themselves, and begin to grow again once the soil does warm up a bit.  So, it’s just not worth trying to push them ahead in your garden – just wait a month to purchase and plant them, and they’ll truly thrive immediately. 
     Remember too that the small plants you purchase – at any time of year – have been coddled and fed when grown in the greenhouse with lots of warmth and nitrogen to get them looking healthy so you purchase them.  Consequently, they’re very tender and susceptible to pests like aphids that love the bright green succulence, especially when shocked by your planting them out into the colder-than-the-greenhouse garden. 
 
Propagating More Plants
     More plants that you can easily propagate from cuttings now include dianthus, dusty miller, euryops, felicia, fuchsias, geraniums, iceplant, lavenders, marguerites, mums, saxifrages, sedums, and succulents.  For step-by-step instructions and photos, see my  2-16-23 blog, Propagating Succulent Cuttings, or my 10-29-16 blog, Propagating Begonias From Cuttings.

Get Those Weeds Out Before They Set Seed
     All this rain and cool weather has enabled weeds to germinate and flourish.  It’s critical to get them out of the garden before they send up their seed stalks.  This kind of recycling you really don’t want!    
 
For more garden task possibilities, see March and April.
 
For discussion of major topics, see the list by season on Homepage.

     Compared with the last five or so years, I’m late in getting my first tomatoes planted into the garden.  But that was then, and this is now.  That was warm temperatures and no rain.  Now is water-soaked soil and temperatures barely in the 60s during the days but still in the 40s at night. 
     But, perusing the veggie seedlings at my favorite nursery, I spotted a dozen varieties of great-looking 4” tomatoes, and took home several of my always-plant types – Sungold and Sweet 100 cherries and Celebrity.  This year I’m also trying Big Beef, lauded for years at various community gardens but I was always more interested in the various heirloom varieties. 
     I always depend on these more common varieties that appear early at nurseries and big-box stores to plant first, then fill in with less-common varieties that I’ll get later when I help out at the Tapia Brothers Tomatomania location (This year, I’ll be there on Sunday, March 26, from about 11am to 3pm and give a presentation on transplanting tomato tips at some point during that time period.  For more information on Tomatomania and its many locations, see https://tomatomania.com/).
 
Back to the Cool Season Veggies
     We’re enjoying our third cauliflower from the ones I’d planted in Fall.  First one was Cheddar, a too-brilliantly-to-be-believed colored namesake that tasted deliciously mild (but thankfully not like the cheese).  Next was a mathematically-perfectly-swirled Romanesco in brilliant chartreuse.  Now we’re finishing Violet, also brilliant in color but mild in flavor. 
     We never got around to cooking them, they were so deliciously sweet eaten raw.   We have four more to go from that batch we’d planted then, and I’ve planted more seedlings as we pick each one. 
     The baby bok choy that I’d planted at the same time as the cauliflower has begun to bolt – lengthening its central stem and setting flower – but continues to be sweetly flavored, especially the stem, just like the cauliflower.
     I’d transplanted the red-leafed tatsoi a month ago, and we’ve already been enjoying its individual leaves.  Like lettuce, I harvest the outer ones and leave only four of the small interior ones to continue developing for later harvest. 
     I get a gallon-ziplock-bag size harvest of lettuce every week.  Mixed with the leaves of the bok choy and beet and chard and kale, this becomes my go-to greens mix for salad, stir-fry, omelette, quiche, stew, soup, and whatever else seems something tasty to prepare.
     So I make a point of seeding and transplanting more of each, and I’m relishing having such long-lasting cool moist soil and air temperatures that these plants so thrive in. 
     Because of this, I much prefer the longevity of edible gardening from Fall through Winter and Spring to the beginning of Summer.  Much more food over a much longer period of time - some 8 months!  But, of course, the heat of summer brings the glorious tomatoes and squash and cucumbers and other yummies. 
     Seeds I’ve just ordered from Park Seed include Champion of England Heirloom Pea, Green Arrow pea, Lincoln Pea, Purple Tavor artichoke, Butterhead Blend lettuce, Aspabroc Hybrid broccoli (supposed to be long-stemmed like asparagus with smaller broccoli-like heads), DePurple cauliflower, Romanesco broccoli.  As soon as they arrive, I’ll seed them directly into the garden in the hopes that they germinate, develop, and bear while the weather is still coolish. 
     This kind of playtime in the garden discovering new treasures and getting to eat it all is what I truly love!
     However, when transplanting your seedlings into the garden, now that the soil is thoroughly drenched and draining slowly, be sure to very gently lift the soil and ease it back around the root ball that you’ve massaged to loosen root strands, and then water the plant in minimally but sufficiently so the entire root system is thoroughly “melted” in good contact with the soil.
      My pea plants are putting out some blooms, but no pods have formed yet. 
   The several varieties of carrots I’d sown are developing nicely, but none is large enough to taste-test yet. 
  Same thing with the Watermelon radishes, with lots of foliage but unexpectedly long and skinny.  Maybe they haven’t formed their globes yet because of all the rain and chill.
     The established artichokes are looking beautifully huge and lush from all the rain.  I loved finding almost a dozen seedlings among the chard-and-breadseed-poppy bed that I’ve transplanted to other locations that’ll probably develop over the summer and then bear their globes next spring. I’m hoping that these are the perennial types, that die back to the ground each year but resprout again. 
     Even if they turn out to be annuals – dying back completely and not resprouting – if they taste great, I’ll be happy.  That was the problem with several of the heirloom varieties I’d purchased over the years in the past – they didn’t taste great after all the battling with the extremely thorny leaves.  That kind of "heirloom-iness" I don't want to deal with!
 
For more monthly tips for this time of year, see March
 
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