Choices for Sowing Seeds
The cool-season vegetable garden starts with new plants or seeds. If you are an early operator there may not be the right plants for you in the nurseries so you have to sow seeds. Because there’s usually a wide range of varieties in seeds packets that are available it’s often the way to go..
Now, in late October or early November, you are presented with a choice between sowing seeds indoors or out in the garden. My own preference is to sow seeds in the garden because the soil is warm after a hot summer, and if it is not, you can warm it by covering the sown seeds with clear plastic. A plastic cover also preserves soil moisture and you don’t need to come to the garden every day to water. Furthermore, there is better light out in the garden while light indoors is seldom adequate. Seeds sown in little containers by the kitchen window usually start their life by leaning towards the light and this weakens them–they seldom make strong plants this way.
You’ll be more successful if you sow seeds at the right depth and the rule of thumb is to put them in the ground at three times their thickness.There is an exception, though, in the case of lettuce which, for some reason, needs to be sown very near the surface. Some people even say that lettuce needs to see the light of day in order to germinate.
But here is a rule that will serve you very well, especially if you start early. Don’t sow all your seed at one time, but make a succession of sowings so you subsequently spread your harvest over time and thus avoid too much of anything by sowing the whole packet at once.
Also, don’t sow your seed in Vee shaped drills because they tend to fall down to the botttom where they sit on top of one another. Instead, avoid resultant crowding and attendant competition by preparing a wide drill that allows seed to rest side by side. Sow lightly.
If you don’t use clear plastic over the seeds you will have to visit the seedbed every day to water, maybe twice a day if the weather is unseasonably warm, windy and dry. When watering try to hold the nozzle up so the water gently comes out and falls like rain. Don’t blast the young seedings as with a fire hose. Birds, such as quail and thrashers, will be tempted to eat up your seeds as soon as they appear. You can protect them by spreading a light sheet (or even better, Floating Row Cover that you buy at a nursery) or by building a little box of small-meshed chicken wire. The floating row cover comes in handy later when we get frosts
There’s a very effective way to raise seedlings, and at the same time get an early harvest of “greens” by scattering seeds quite lighty in a square foot space. As time goes by you thin out those smaller seedlings and eat them. Keep the larger stronger plants as long as you can and eat them when they are mature. In this way you avoid pulling up a young plant and shocking it and you let them send their roots down without trsnaplant shock.
Most of our cool-season vegetables have small seeds, but peas and faba beans have large enough seeds for you to measure the spacing by using a measuring stick. Large plants need more room to avoid crowding. We tend to sow seeds too thickly.
Seed sowing can go on until early March using interval sowing, but the growth will slow down in December and January when both the weather and the soil is cold. A way to sidestep this period of temporay dormancy is to erect a tunnel of clear plastic over a part of your garden using tubing as supporting framework. You’ve made a little greenhouse and you’ll need to open it up if we get days of bright sunshine. But close it up again before the sun goes down to conserve the warmth.
