Tips On Vegetables For The Western Garden
What a flurry of activity there must be in the western garden now! Spring is planting time. No doubt your nursery plants… trees, shrubs and flowers will all be planted, by now. Early vegetables, such as lettuce, radishes, peas and onions, will already be poking their heads above the ground. It may be time now to make a second planting of some of these vegetables, particularly lettuce and radishes, to insure young, tender plants coming along through the summer months. In fact, plan to plant these vegetables successively, say, at two week intervals until about July. In that way, you will have young tender radishes and fresh lettuce for salads throughout the summer.
Which are you going to choose… head lettuce or leaf lettuce? If you are in a section where the summer becomes hot, start with head lettuce for the early crop, so that it heads out before hot weather sets in. If you have a small greenhouse, you may have started some head lettuce early and grown it as a transplant crop. Thats a good way to get lettuce to head before the hot weather sets in.
For the summer crop in the hot section, leaf lettuce is much more satisfactory. New varieties are improvements on older varieties since they show less tendency to bolt or send up seed stalks than older varieties. They stand heat better. In the higher altitudes and mountain sections, head lettuce may be grown successfully, even during the summer months.
Dont set out warm season vegetables on your garden until after the danger of frost is past but you can start now with your terraced garden ideas. This date will vary in different localities in this region. It may be around the middle of May in the earliest section of the region until almost near mid-June in the higher sections at the extreme west end of the region.
Warm-season vegetables cover a wide range of different kinds. They include members of the Cucurbit family such as cucumbers, squash and pumpkins; members of the Nightshade family such as tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, beans and others. A number of these are transplanted into the garden, although in more southerly sections some of them may be seeded directly out of doors. Some cool season crops may be transplanted at this time also. These include celery, cabbage, caulifiower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts.
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