Over the past few years gardening, I have been learning all about planting dates. The weather is different from year to year, so starting things too early can be a bit of a gamble. The flip side of that is start a crop too late and you might not get a harvest out of it should an early frost come in the fall. Crops also grow at variable rates depending on the amount of daylight and temperature they are exposed to. Growing in the mountains poses a unique challenge because during the day the temps can be quite warm and nice, but in the spring and fall, night time temps can plummet which is detrimental to many crops. Heat loving plants like peppers and tomatoes tend to have a hard time dealing with wild temperature swings and may go dormant if the temps fall too far at night. Cold loving plants may do well in the spring and fall because they don't mind the temperature dips at night, but during the summer, they don't tolerate the heat of the day well and may bolt if they are too warm for too long.
All of these variables need to be taken into account when planning out a garden. Another variable that I include when I am planning my planting schedule is the phase of the moon. I am not typically a hardcore believer in folk lore, but I do believe that the moon phase can influence plant growth. When you are participating in a natural process like growing plants, I think it is wise to pay attention to the cycles of the earth. These cycles are what the plants have always taken their cue from and it couldn't hurt to follow their lead. The idea is that you should plant above ground crops during a waxing moon (getting fuller every day) and you should plant root crops during a waning moon.
This year I am trying a new approach to scheduling my planting dates. This will be the first year that I am going to track my garden with a monthly planner. I have kept scattered notes in a notebook in the past, but this is my attempt at being more organized so that I can hopefully be successful in starting a small market garden. I am still keeping the notebook for crop rotation notes and for mapping out my garden beds, but I want to use the planner to keep myself on track as I attempt to do more succession planting in the garden to make it more productive. I also plan on tracking germination times for different crops at different times of the year, as well as how long it takes for the crop to reach harvestable size. I think all of this information will be very useful in the future.
So far in my planner I have mapped out the dates of the full and new moons for each month. I have also marked the last and first average frost dates for the year. Those two dates are how I determine when to start seeds, transplant seedlings, or plant crops outside. Each type of vegetable has it's own set of growing needs and I start seeds keeping in mind how long they will take to grow to a transplantable size. Some seeds take a long time to germinate and start growing, so those I will be starting the earliest, possibly even this week. As spring nears I will start the delicate dance of hardening off seedlings - putting them out for a few hours during the day and bringing them in or covering them at night. Winter has only just begun, but gardening season is just around the corner. Now is the perfect time to work out the main plans for the coming year. Of course things will have to get tweaked depending on weather and available time. Hopefully I will remember to record any hiccups in the planner to help things go even smoother in the future.
The last thing I need to do to be completely ready is to mark down dates for each individual vegetable that I plan on growing. I want to have a general idea about how many seedlings I will need to plant to fill my garden beds. I only have a limited number of grow lights, so I will try to start things that I can rotate out quickly in the beginning. My first round of plantings will most likely involve my brassicas. I want to try to grow enough broccoli for market as well as for personal use, so I will be starting many seedlings of this variety. I hope they establish themselves quickly as I want to start hardening them off in the warmer days of late winter. My goal is to plant them out under plastic low tunnels so I can get an early crop from them. If I have room I will start some celery seedlings as well. They won't be able to go out as early as the broccoli, but they take a long time to get big enough for transplanting, so they need to be one of the first to get seeded.
The next groups of vegetables I want to start early would be the peppers and tomatoes. Those two heat loving crops fare much better if they are fairly good sized by the time they are transplanted. Last year I started them too close to the last frost date and they just weren't very big when I went to transplant them. They took a long time to start growing and fruiting, so I hope that by starting them even earlier than usual, that I can get a good head start on the season this year.
Most of my other crops will be direct seeded into the garden later in the season when growing conditions are right. Things like spinach and peas will still germinate in colder temperatures so they will likely get planted right around the first day of spring if the weather cooperates. They will be followed by successions of other brassicas, carrots, parsnips and lettuces. Then some time around the last frost of the spring I will plant out the warm weather successions in the garden. This will include the cucumbers, squash, beans and corn. The last frost date also dictates when I can transplant the peppers and tomatoes out in the garden. I am looking forward to the upcoming growing season and I hope to gain a lot of information about the vegetables that I want to grow for market.
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