By George! - A Blog!

Squash Vine Borer

This is a summer scourge that gives us a great disappointment.  The moth that lays the eggs seems to pick the more healthy plants to lay her eggs on the stem.  If you are observant, you can see a bright pale green egg the size of a pinhead.  If you do, scrape it off and keep looking.  If the eggs are left to themselves they hatch out and the little grub works into the stem interrupting the flow of water and nutrients so the plant wilts then dies or is unproductive.

There is no way to keep the moth away.  It is a bit bigger than a honeybee, is furry with a red tail, and is a quick daytime flyer.  It seems reasonable to screen off the plant to keep the pest out but you will also screen out the pollinators that are necessary for pollination.  The best management approach is to pull out the affected plants and replace them with a new one.  I remember one year putting seed in the ground on 4^th of July and we had fruit four weeks later.  Of course this relates to zucchini squash the other kinds will be slower growers. 

            The adult insect seems to prefer stems that are lying on the ground and this means older plants that have lost their vigor.  Don’t keep squash plants into their old age.  Sowing seed every six weeks will give you a supply of young vigorous plants and you can put out seed until mid September and still get a harvest.  Planting too close gives a protective forest of greenery that attracts the moth and makes it hard for you to see new eggs. 

            It will help you to monitor ripeness in squash if you sow a variety that has yellow fruit, green fruit grows so quickly that it becomes too big for good harvests because you can’t see the speed of fruit development. 

            Of course there are more kinds of squash than zucchini so it’s a good plan to put out a few of the other kinds even if they are slower growing.

Curly Top of Tomatoes

Desert summers are not the best for growing tomatoes and one of the main problems is an invasion of a virus carried by small insects called leafhoppers.  They suck the juices of juicy plants and they are all over the desert.  When the annual plants in the desert die out and dry out, the insects leave for greener pastures and mostly these are our gardens.  Their favorite home seems to be tomatoes, but they also go for peppers and some other plants.  As they come into our gardens, they bring diseases in the same way mosquitoes carry malaria.  The symptoms are a distortion of leaves particularly the tender ones and heavy infestation will kill the plant.  A light infestation will reduce the plant’s ability to give a good harvest.  The best treatment is to pull up and infected plant although some gardeners hope for the best and keep hoping for a recovery.  The best thing is to pull out a bad plant and dispose of the body by not putting it in the compost pile.  It is a possibility to put out a new plant from a nursery as long as it is not already affected.  The leafhopper pest prefers bright sunshine so shading the plants gives some sort of avoidance measure, but once you have curlytop there is no cure.

            There used to be hope for variety of tomato that appeared resistant to the disease, but I am not certain that these are still available.  In any case they may not be truly adapted to desert conditions and I suggest you keep growing those kinds that give you good fruit.  Shade the plants as quickly as you can.  It seems that 30% shade is best because if you use too much shade your plants are growing in the dark. 

BLOSSOM END ROT AND SUNBURN

            A lot of our fruiting vegetables just cannot stand the sunshine.  Exposed fruit will show sunburn just like we do after a day in the sun.  We cover up if we are sensible and that’s the best thing to do for our tomatoes, bell peppers, and even eggplant.  If we read through a seeds’ catalog and find a good variety to eat, we do not want to spoil success by having the fruit damaged by the sun.  Some varieties naturally produce their fruit under a canopy of green leaves where as those varieties that expose their fruit are sure to be damaged. 

            Of course sunburn will be worse, if the plant becomes short of water, but the way to avoid this loss is to provide the shade yourself.  An old sheet will be good enough if you don’t want to pay for nursery shade material such as floating row cover or any of the lightweight sheets of plant protection.   There is no need to build a structure, you can put the fabric directly over the plant.  The wind may blow it off so you will have to keep an eye on things.  Green shade cloth or black shade cloth is not recommended they are too dark. 

            If sunburn occurs just on a small part of the fruit, it can be cut out and you can eat the rest.

            Another problem similar to sunburn is a condition called Blossom End Rot, which happens at the far end of the fruit, which turn black.  There are speculative suggestions why this happens.  Calcium imbalance is one, irregular watering is another, and too quick a growth is a third it is difficult to know the true reason.  I think the best way to avoid this problem is by not growing varieties that appear to be more susceptible.  It appears that shading is of help.  Fruit that has this deformity are usually not worth saving, but if you can cut out the black fruit end perhaps you can eat the remainder. 

FINALLY

            It’s and easy way to control Bermuda grass by not allowing it to grow.  If you dig out the very beginning of a weed’s growth, it will not become an enormous handicap to good gardening.  You do not want to be tolerant of any seedling that can become a weed and Bermuda grass is the extreme example of this.  Keep digging seedlings and save yourself a lot of work later on.

There’s a disappointing shock for the gardener who finds his plot is hard to dig and water does not drain well. This is usually due to the presence of underground compaction.  There are a few reasons for this but the most troubling one is caliche.  You never know how deep down it is until you dig.  And you never know how thick it is until you dig long enough to get through.  There is only one way to get rid of this and that is to dig it out and take it away.  Chemical treatments are not effective in spite of some magazine advertisements.  Caliche may be shallow or deep, thick or thin, solid or grainy. It took ages to form when water with a high calcium content evaporated into solid material.  Once this process starts it’s like snow sticking to a snowball.  You often find caliche lying underneath a flat area such as at all of our gardens.

It’s advisable before starting a garden to do a drainage test.  This is a small hole but a deep one–about three feet deep. And in the case of trees make it five feet deep.  Fill the hole with water and if drains out over night you probably don’t have a problem.  Bear in mind that roots of all plants need air and fresh nutrients and this is what good drainage ensures.

Aphids don’t become obvious until there are too many of them.  They don’t lay eggs but give birth to live young.  And the live young produce more live young until a soft growing point of a plant is smothered.  Aphids suck out the juices of plants and weaken them.  They must be got rid of and this calls for early action.  They can be pinched out in the early stages and they can be sprayed when there are a lot of them. A tablespoon of Dawn dish soap in one gallon of water sprayed when the sun is low, morning and evening, should take care of a light infestation. If things have gotten away from you the best solution is to pull up the plant without shaking the aphids on the ground or on nearby plants. Put the affected plant in a plastic bag and take it away.  Our compost piles will not destroy the aphids because they are not hot enough.  Aphids are found on the tender growing points of weeds so it’s good husbandry to keep a weed-free garden.

Just when tomato fruit appears we often get a crinkling of the leaves and a weakening of the plant.  This is caused by a virus that has been brought to our young green plants because the natural home of the Beet Leaf Hopper, which is desert annuals, is dying of the heat.  This natural cycle is hard to break and there is no remedial treatment that works.  The only thing to do is to pull out an affected plant and hope the others do not get infected.  There seems to be some varieties which are more resistant to the problem and the ones we know are the cherries and the pears.  Fortunately the seed catalogues are offering newer kinds with larger fruit and it’s worthwhile trying some of these.  There is a danger in bringing this problem to your garden if you accept gifts of plants that are already affected and you may not see this until later. So be careful of Greeks bearing gifts.  As with all diseases, do a good cleanup and don’t leave affected plants lying around.

Here in Tucson the weather has recently changed for the better for man and beast and, importantly, trees and shrubs. It sems that winter dormancy is over and many trees and shrubs have started to leaf out. Others are going to do so in a few days. We have a situation where the beginning of summer is obvious to us and we look forward to a green landscape very soon

But there’s a catch and it revolves around the fact that we have not had enough rain to support this initial plant exuberance. What could happen in many cases is that the plants will exhaust the moisture reserves in their bodies, and unless there’s a good reserve of soil moisture the plants will exhaust themsleves. It behoves us to give all trees and shrubs that are putting out new leaves a good irrigation that lasts long enough for moisture to get downto the roots. If it goes beyond that zone, it won’t be wasted because it will flush out accumulated salts from the soil.

Not all trees and shrubs are at the same stage of “waking up”. The first to do this are deciduous fruit trees such as figs, almonds, apricots and peaches. Then new growth will appear among the citrus trees together with flowers. If citrus trees are short of moisture at flowering time, some of the flowers will drop off and the harvest will be light. It’s easy to ensure a good fruit crop at this time of the year by giving a good irrigation. Last of all the native trees will follow the routine. Therefore, you need to spread your activity over the next two months, but don’t forget to give a good irigation when your trees and shrubs tell you they need help.

With your landscape trees, and especially native plants, you can limit exuberant growth by irrigating only a little and not using fertilizers—enough to keep them alive and barely growing. There are occasions when you don’t want to have a giant in a limited space. You do have some control, but it takes judgement and courage

A “good” irrigation means allowing water to fill a shallow basin that extends out to beyond the ends of the branches (the drip-line). Keep the water running until you can easily poke a stick three feet into the soil. It might mean runing the water all night if you have a drip system.

This provision of water is most important but an added bonus might be a scattering of ammonium sulfate (at the rate of a pound to a hundred square feet of moist soil) half way through the job.

There’s another aspect of the weather change coupled with dry soil, and that is that annual weeds are beginning to dry out because they are short of water and therefore they are flowering and setting seed. If you like to spray weeds the best time is already over, but it’s worth doing if you won’t pull them. Of course, mature weeds don’t easily come out of dry soil either.

There are plenty of traditional sayings and natural indications that winter is over and they tell us to think about starting summer gardening. Some are good and some are not. I believe there is only one true signal for us to be aware of and I want you to know of it. But before we come to that let’s look at some that are not so reliable, though they certainly appeal to our impatience.

BIRDS LOUDLY SING THEIR DAYBREAK MORNING CHORUS
This is actually a good indication of a change in the season, but it’s related to the daylength more than to increasing temperatures. If you keep chickens you know that egg-laying is co-incidental with the start of longer days. You may know that commercial poultrymen “fool” their birds with artificial light.

CAROLINA JASMINE GIVES US A DISPLAY OF BRIGHT YELLOW FLOWERS

There are other plants, too, that reliably start to “wake up” from winter before the others and they are responding to air temperatures as well as daylength. We could include Feathery-leaved Cassia and the decidous fruit trees almond, apricot and peach. They are not reliable indicators to tell us when to put plants in the ground.

THE EQUINOX

This is an entirely arbitrary date because gardeners come from different parts of the country and in any case the date rsmply tells us where the sun is before it starts to influence the soil in our gardens. I don’t think it is applicable except by coincidence, again because we are not measuring anything useful.

MARCH 15 IS THE DATE TO START SUMMER GARDENING BECAUSE ITS THE LAST DAY OF KILLING FROSTS

This isn’t a reliable date , though it is trying to be scientific based on years of measurement, because the weather is completely unreliable. Moreover,different parts of our topography have different elevations. Even though the records have been made for many years, and for specific places, most of our gardeners live in other places. On a broad basis, Phoenix and the low desert places warm up faster than Tucson, which warms up a bit faster than Green Valley, which is a faster starter than higher elevations around Nogales and Sierra Vista.

THE REAPPEARANCE OF GROUND SQUIRRELS THAT HAVE BEEN DORMANT UNDERGROUND.

This is good indicator because it’s actually noticing a change in soil temperatures and the squirrels in a sunny southern slope will come out before those that live in a flat low valley, even just a few yards away.

A BARE-BOTTOMED FARMER SITTING ON HIS SOIL IN SPRING KNOWS WHEN TO SOW HIS BARLEY SEEDS

This is how it was in Europe in the olden days before science took over farming operations and called it agriculture. It eliminated the transference of observations on wildlife into direct human assessment, though I imagine different farmers made different judgments. However, the farmer was, in his own way, measuring soil temperature and his own soil temperature was what he was interested in, not some government pronouncement in the spring.

BERMUDA GRASS TURNS GREEN

Again, this is a direct measure of soil warmth but it comes too late for an early start to our gardening. Corn and tomatoes need to be planted as early as possible because hot weather is coming and pollen production will be jeopardised by the ambient heat of July and August. The melons and squashes and sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas will take the heat, so watching bermudagrass turn green may not be a bad indicator for them.

THE TRUE INDICATOR OF WHEN TO PLANT IS A SUITABLE SOIL TEMPERATURE FOR DIFFERENT VARIETIES

This is so important and it’s a shame we don’t pay attention to it. Seeds failing to “come up” is usually blamed on “poor seed’ but beans sowed in July in hot soil will rot just as easily as garden peas that need to wait for cooler soil in November. If we wait too long in the fall for the time to sow sweet corn we often get runts. When spring comes and we hurry to plant tomatoes because the nurseries are full of gorgeous plans in flower before the optimum soil temperaturs has arrived, we create our own failure.

We now have tables that tell us the earliest-optimum-ideal temperature for all the usual garden crops. They are easy to read (and there’s a table on page 172 in my book “Desert Gardenening–Fruits and Vegetables”). Take your time to read it, even study it and discover the relationship between soil temperature and the different kinds of vegetables we can succesfully grow in the desert.

All you need is a soil thermometer, available at hardware stores and nurseries at a modest price of around ten dollars. Measure the soi at the depth of where you sow seeds, or set out plants

This scientific instrument will immediately enhance your gardening skills and ensure success for you. It replaces all of the above-mentioned old-fashioned ideas. If it’s impossible for you to change your old thoughts and practices be sure that your neighbors do not see you squatting on the ground and smiling this spring. The police may come and take you away.

When you visit a nursery at this time of year (January-February) it’s quite likely that you’ll be impressed by an overwhelming display of bare root roses and deciduous fruit trees.

They appear to be a bargain when you compare the prices with existing container-grown plants but beware!! Reputable old-time nurseries long ago gave up selling bare root stock, and for good reason. They didn’t like refunding the purchase price because the plants died.

Mother Nature is not in favor of bare-root planting, and this why. At this time of year our soils are cold and do not allow new root growth until much later on. This means that bare-root stock has to rely on its own moisture reserves, and they are not adequate to support vigorous new leaf growth encouraged by the warming air temperatures and our stimulating sunshine. Plants invariably put out a lot of new leaves and, in the case of deciduous fruit trees, a fine display of flowers. These flowers will not develop into fruit and often the plant itself will dry out before it starts new roots.

There’s not much we can do to change these natural conditions so it’s better not to try planting bare-root plants until the soil has warmed up in March, by which time there won’t be any bare-root plants in the nurseries. They will have gone to the land-fill.

If they haven’t gone to the land-fill they may have been put into containers where they will continue responding to sunshine and air temperatures. The plants will look good but if you are a cautious shopper you’ll gently pull up the stalk and if it easily comes away from the soil you’ll know there are no roots there to hold it. It will be too risky a job ( but a telling one) to do a more rigorous test by turning the container over to examine the root ball– the new soil will make a heap on the ground and you’ll be holding a bare-root plant.

On your nursery visit your eye may catch a bunch of bare-root fruit trees in a sunny corner, where they are sure to be showing a lot of beautiful flowers simply begging you to buy them. Don’t do it!! Those new trees came from a cooler part of the country and responded to our sunny warmer temperatures by vigorously coming out of dormancy. They are exhausting themselves before your eyes.

If you want to plant a fruit tree or a rose bush you need to wait until the soil warms up to about eighty-five degrees and while you are waiting for this to happen you can certainly dig your planting hole. A lazy gardener will dig only a few inches whereas a purposeful gardener will heed the advice of successful gardeners who open up the soil down to four or five feet, discovering whether there is caliche there and digging through it. Organic matter should be incorporated together with ammoniun phosphate and soil sulfur. It calls for strenuous work but it’s a good basic beginning and the cool weather allows you to do it comfortably. After you’ve settled the soil by stomping it and watering it down you can warm it by covering the hole with clear plastic and letting solar energy take over for the next fortnight or so.

There are two kinds of cold that affect gardening. The first is obvious because we are daily reminded by the radio and the T-V. of air temperatures. The second is often overlooked and that is soil temperature. At this time of year we need to know what is happening in both cases and to take steps to avoid damage to our plants.

Location determines the onset of cold temperatures, gardens that are on the edges of washes ( as with our garden at Sabino Vista) collect cold temperatures because cold air moves downhill, just as water does. If it collects there because there is no outlet, such as a wall, our plants will be sure to freeze. Cold air that is moving is less damaging than stagnant cold air. Gardens that are situated on sloping ground that allows air drainage are less likely to have frost damage. South facing slopes are better than northern ones because the sun strikes the soil at a better angle and, of course, gardens in the shade are lnot likely to warm up during the day.

Cold winds from the north bring in freezing temperatures and there’s not much we can do about that except to be ready for them. Listen to the weather reports, have sheets ready to cover sensitive trees like citrus and if the weather is going to be cold and long-lasting have a heat source to put under the trees. A 60 watt bulb in a bucket with a complete covering of the tree with a sheet will protect fruit and leaves. For ground vegetables a covering of a sheet, a frost blanket (from nurseries) or even layers of newspaper will trap the previous day’s warmth from sunshine. These coverings should be taken off during the day and put back on before the sun goes down. It’s a chore that few of us enjoy doing, but bear in mind that one night of frost can destroy weeks of good gardening.

The dangerous situation to look out for is several days of cloudy weather followed by clear night skies. Heat from the earth radiates up in our clear desert skies but if the nights are cloudy it’s not likely to be a frosty night

We want the soil to be warmed as much as possible during the day and that’s why we should abandon the use of summertime mulches that stopped our soils getting too hot.

A way to preserve our plants from air cold and soil cold is easily done by creating a miniature greenhouse over our garden plot. Several gardeners are doing this with wonderful results. You need some pliable wire hoops and some clear plastic. See pages 15 and 257 of my book which have pictures for you to help you get the idea. You may need to open the ends of the tunnel on hot days to dry out the atmosphere inside. Otherwise you’re creating a good environment for aphids and fungi. Humidity inside a tunnel condenses on the cold plastic and falls down to the soil saving water from the drip irrigation, which sometimes needs to be turned off.

All this hazardous cold weather comes to an end in mid-March when seed sowing and planting out can be resumed. However, don’t be in a hurry but wait for the soil to be properly warmed. Look at the chart on page 172 that tells you the optimum soil temperatures for the start of your springtime activity. Soil thermometers are cheap and available at hardware stores and nurseries. They make a good post Christmas gift for the Gardener You Forgot..

Some gardeners have been misled by the Newsletter’s Planting Guide when it says to sow seeds of tomatoes in January. Sorry about that, but what is intended is to get you to sow seeds indoors, ready for setting out plants in your garden in March

Last week, when we began to get night temperatures in the fifties, our citrus trees transformed themselves. They suddenly showed us how much fruit they carried. Of course, the fruit was there all summer but it was as green as the leaves and we had to look closely to find it. Not all came out in the same intensity of color–Tangeloes and Navel oranges are still largely green and grapefruit area pale yellow but the tangerines show the brightest change.

This color change is due more to cooler temperatures than to ripeness and from a calendar point of view the change is a little late this year. It seems to me that all fruit especially the tangerines was brighter by the time Thanksgiving arrived and, thankfully, they were sometimes ripe enough to eat. Those of us who are of a worrying kind can attribute this to global warming, and perhaps we are right.

The Thanksgiving table is brightened by a bowl of tangerines and the palate is stimulated by the smell of the skin when we peel it and the tongue gets its share too. But this year we may have missed the chance. By all means pick some fruit for appearances but be careful of its taste and flavor. Relatives coming from colder places for a family get together don’t need to leave with a sour taste in their mouths.

The only way to enjoy a ripe citrus fruit is to wait until it is sweet and juicy. You need to do a taste test on a few of the outermost fruit. Tangerines are the first to be ready but they don’t last longer than six or eight weeks so you need to gorge on them or share them with friends and neighbors. Navels and tangeloes come next and because they are a little slow to ripen they seem to last longer. Grapefruit come much later in spite of the color change and are really at their sweetest in May or June. This is a surprise for people new to citrus growng because they like to have grapefruit for Christmas and will be reaching for the sugar bowl because of their haste.

Somewhat contradictory to this progressive ripening time are the lemons and limes. They can be ripe and juicy while they are still green, so it’s best to do a taste test quite early to find out what you’ve got.

In passing you may have noticed that some citrus in the stores is quite green and you wonder why unripe fruit is being sold. These fruit most likely came from warmer Mexico where the local people eat green ripe oranges all the time and think nothing of it. And if you’ve taken a cruise in the Carribean and scouted the markets you might have wondered why the local people are buying green “unripe” oranges and enjoying them. It’s a temperature thing again.

Here’s some more trivia for you, though its not trivial to growers and traders and processors of citrus. Florida fruit can’t compete with California fruit in appearance and customer appeal because it is green (because of their climate) whereas California fruit is chilled by cold air coming from the Sierras and therefore has good color. Because of this fruit from Florida ends up in the markets as juice, at a lower price per orange. I think that California politicians have somehow got mixed up in this fact of geography by imposing tariffs on green fruit.

Eat up your tangerines first (after a taste test, of course) and then start on the Navels and tangeloes, leaving the grapefruit for last. You should be able to eat some kind of citrus fruit for half the year. With the posible exception of tangerines, leave the fruit on the tree rather than pick the lot as if they were apples or cherries. Citrus fruit stores best on the tree so get your daily does of vitamin C every day by picking every day until they are all gone.

If you have a bumper crop and can’t eat it all, remember that all kinds of citrus fruit makes good marmalade. All you need is a lot of sugar and a stick to stir it with.

November in the desert is onion planting time.

This comes as a surprise to many people because of our approaching winter. However, onions are cool-season plants and are seldom damaged by frost. The fact that they ripen and are harvested in June or July makes people think that onions are summertime plants.

Our Steering Committee volunteers look into the financial statement in October and wonder whether to spend money on buying young plants for our gardeners as a Thanksgiving gift. Every gardener (and we have many more than we had last year) will get fifty little plants in November. This is a double success story because, first, we can afford it because we are frugal minders of our resources and, secondly, we have chosen a good variety (Contessa) for our area that gardeners like. .

We get our plants from Dixondale Farms in Carrizo Springs in Texas and if you want to raise your own from seed you are late in starting. Seeds should have been sown some ten weeks ago. This probably means that you will buy seedlings from a nursery near you. Onions are day length sensitive plants and you should buy only “short-day” kinds if you want big hamburger type bulbs. If the nurseries don’t know what they are selling, you’ll be a loser. “Short-day” types include Contessa, Southern Bell Red, Texas Supersweet 1015Y, Yellow Granex, and White Bermuda.

Onions do well in a rich soil with plenty of organic matter. Give them a boost of ammonium sulfate when they start to flower. Cut off the flower stalks in order to direct energy into bulb development. Harvest the bulbs in June after the leaves have turned brown and dry. Lift the bulbs and store them out of the sun, otherwise they’ll blister and spoil.

Meanwhile, when the seedlings arrive don’t worry if they are a little “pooped”. It’s surprising how they quickly recover if you plant them in moist soil. Avoid deep planting, try to get just the roots in soil, An onion crop efficiently uses garden space because you can plant five or six in a square foot of garden–even closer if you harvest half of them as “spring onions” after a month or two of growth, leaving the other half to grow six inches apart at maturity. Our gardeners have found that Contessa is a good mild onion that keeps well. In fact, only now are stored bulbs starting to sprout (telling us it’s onion-planting time!). One gardener, at least, hangs last years onions in old nylons inside her grapefruit tree where its shady and airy.

There are other types worthy of your attention. The Tohono O”Odom bunching onion allows you to pick small green onions from the bunch any time you need an onion. The remaining bunch continues to grow and produce a harvest all through the summer and into Fall. There are Shallots, and “spring onions” and there’s an Egyptian Onion that additionally makes little pungent bulbs on the ends of its stalks.

All are nutritious, contain a lot of sulfur, and are said to retard cancerous growths if you eat half a cup of chopped onions three times a week.

Become a healthy onion grower this year!!

Our Community Gardeners are busy sowing seeds of cool-season vegetables. Some like to grow flowers but growing them from seed is a waste of time because there are so many young plants available in the nurseries and you can see what you are getting. If you have special seeds of certain flowers you collected from a vacation trip or from relatives, it’s another story but you’ll have to wait a long time before you get flowery results.

The same arguments apply to the leafy vegetables. You’ll get faster results from bought plants but there’s a snag to this apparent advantage–you often don’t know what variety you’re getting.

This week I cleaned out the summer residues in my greenhouse and made it ready for new plantings. I was desperate for strawberry plants and I’d exhausted the kindness of our gardeners who had given me spares when they thinned out crowded plots. Although this is the best time for starting a strawberry bed there aren’t any reasonably-priced plants in the nurseries. By a stroke of luck I found what I was looking for and bought eighteen little plants of the right size. I was looking for the variety called Sequoia, one which I know is a good producer here in the desert. The label informed that I was buying strawberry and they should be planted in full sun and would be producing in thirty to forty days.

I think I have a pig in a poke, and I’m ready to be a bit adventurous but I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed for forty days.

Back, then, to the choice of buying plants or seeds. You may not get the variety you want when you wait for the nurseries to stock up with cool-season plants but you have a wider choice through the catalogs that sell seed packets.

In the case of the cool-season root vegetables you have to use seed because you direct-sow, being unable to transplant radish, beets, turnip, carrots or the other ‘rooty” vegetables.

Old-time advice was to make a long straight drill with the corner edge of a hoe, and sow seed in the furrow. What often happened was that the seeds tumbled down to the bottom in a crowded heap and the struggling competitive seedlings were weak and drawn out. Then the gardener would hoe out most of those seedlings to make room for strong growth.

Here’s another way to sow seeds. Set aside a small square part of your garden and scratch the soil to make a rough seedbed. Scatter seed from the packet all over this square patch. You can control the delivery by holding the packet high up and by tapping the thumb bone to urge seeds, one by one, out of the packet. This is a better, more accurate, way to get a light, even, distribution of seed than by throwing out the seed as if you were feeding the chickens.

If the seeds are very small mix them with clean dry sand whose particles are the same size as the seed. You’ll get a lighter sowing this way. If you like gardening gadgets there’s a trowel-like dispenser that puts out one seed at a time with a click of your finger on the trigger. After you’ve sown the seed, scratch the soil to evenly bury them

If you are a patient gardener (and surely we all should be) you can lay out a piece of a paper towel on the kitchen table and put a spot of Elmer’s glue at the spacing your mature plants will need when they are approaching maturity. Before the glue dries, put a seed (or two if you’re a pessimist) on the spot. Now you lay this sheet down in the garden and cover it with an inch of soil. The paper towel will rot after a few days and the seeds will safely do what seeds do–come up, nice and green!.

As an observant gardener, you will have noticed how self-sown plants are strong and vigorous. This is because their roots go down deep and are undisturbed. On the other hand, plants that you set out seem to suffer from a planting shock and unless you are careful to avoid bending the leading roots such plants don’t do well.