Vegetable Gardening - Seeds Or Plants?

Should you start your vegetable garden with seeds or plants? Well, it depends on the type of crop you want to grow.

Many vegetables - beans, peas, carrots, corn, lettuce and spinach - grow best if seeded directly into the soil. How deep you plant them depends on the size of the seed. A good general rule is to plant three times as deep as the diameter of the seed. Very fine seeds are barely covered, while large seeds, such as bean or peas, go deeper.

Seed packets have a wealth of information on the back, telling you how deep and how far apart to plant and how many days it will take for germination.

Tiny seeds such as carrots and lettuce are hard to plant a specific distance apart, so you have to remove excess seedlings, (called "thinning out"). It can be hard to make yourself to pull out tiny live plants, but if the seed packet recommends thinning, do it; otherwise your plants will be crowded and can't develop properly.

Garden centers sell young vegetable plants (called transplants) for popular vegetables including tomatoes, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and peppers. You could grow these from seed yourself, in a bright windowsill or under lights - but when you're starting out, it's easier to buy transplants.

The main reason for starting your own seedlings is to try varieties not readily available at garden centers. The easiest way to grow onions is to buy tiny bulb onions called onion sets, which you plant quite shallowly, so a bit of their neck still shows.

When to plant

When to plant your vegetable garden depends on what you're growing. You don't have to wait until the frost-free date in the spring to start planting vegetables: some like it cool and grow best before the heat of summer really gets going; others like it hot - these you plant later.

Cool season crops

The cool customers include greens (lettuce, spinach, arugula, mesclun salad mixes, Swiss chard), the cabbage clan (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower), peas (shelling, sugar snap and snow types). These veggie plants grow well in temperatures between 60ºF and the low 70s (15-22ºC), but go to seed and die off when temperatures soar into the high 80s or 90s (above 30ºC). Plant these crops when the daffodils are in bloom.

Warm Season Crops

Heat-loving crops - tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, corn, squash, zucchini, cucumbers and beans - are happiest when both the soil and air temperatures average 60ºF (15ºC) and above day and night. Plant these when the soil has warmed up and there is no more chance of frost, generally after May 24th or into early June, or whenever the frost-free date is in your region.

By Yvonne Cunnington

Yvonne Cunnington is an avid gardener, garden writer and photographer. She contributes regularly to gardening magazines and is the author of Clueless in the Garden: A Guide for the Horticulturally Helpless. For more gardening tips, visit her website at http://flower-gardening-made-easy.com | Sign up for her free gardening web-magazine here: http://www.flower-gardening-made-easy.com/sign-up.html

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