It may be unusually warm and too wet for February, but it remains perfect weather for planting hardy early vegetables. People who didn’t put garlic in the soil in fall, have a great chance to plant it now and still get a decent crop by August.
Garlic is so pungent nothing molests it in the garden during winter. But for shallots, spring planting is much safer in gardens where voles tunnel under the soil. The gardener wonders why the shallots aren’t growing and uncovers a row of shallot-shaped holes.
Soil pests are one situation where containers are a more manageable situation for growing vegetables than the open garden. In early spring, containers set against a house wall also tend to be a warmer situation and are especially useful for salad crops.
Arugula can be started any time now. It’s quite cold-hardy with leaves that taste spicy and nutty and really liven up salads. Once arugula plants get close to flowering and also once the weather becomes warmer, the flavour becomes very hot. You can keep arugula going quite a while by frequent cutting. The variety called ‘Wild Arugula’ is perennial.
Green onions are ideal for container planting outside now. Their vertical growth habit allows you to get masses of salad material out of very small space.
Corn salad can also be started in containers, it’s a cold-hardy shapely little plant when young with dark green, glossy leaves and a mild, flavour. Once you plant one patch, you’ll have masses of seed for ever-more. There’s a variety called Granon, which holds its leaves up away from the soil
It’s also time to plant radishes. The spring radishes are globe-shaped and very fast-growing. They do appreciate rich soil and lots of water.
Lots of gardeners come to grief with the radish bulb fly — row covers really help here — and all the more if the radishes are grown in containers. Used on top of containers, row covers don’t get as muddy and can be re-used for years.
Spinach is hardy enough to be seeded outside now and this season keeping the seedbed adequately moist doesn’t look like any problem.
The big need of spinach is nitrogen and as the weather gets warmer and lawn-mowing starts spinach does well growing among grass-clippings to hold in moisture. If you always choose the outer leaves, you can keep harvesting spinach for a long time.
The vegetables that really need to be started inside in February are winter leeks because they take a very long time to grow to transplantable size. These are very frost-hardy, usually dark green or purplish and larger and sturdier than the summer leeks. Leeks are transplanted in late April or May by being dropped into holes poked into the soil.
This is also the time to plant broad beans. This is one crop (like peas) that leaves the soil better than it finds it because it fixes nitrogen from the air into root nodules which nourish other plants. These are best picked very young because the skin of broad beans gets very tough as they mature.
Anne Marrison is happy to answer garden questions. Send them to her via amarrison@shaw.ca It helps me if you give the name of your city or region.
