When to start spring plants
How To Start Spring Plants By Seed And Transplants
[mellow music playing]
Welcome back to Southwest Yard and Garden I'm John White today we're going
to be taking some letters from the mailbag and our first question is what
can I plant in this time of year and this is from John in Las Cruces and
what we're going to be looking at is cool season varieties right now this
time of year because we're still a few weeks maybe even a couple months off of
our last frost date here in the southern part of state we're looking at somewhere
around August I mean excuse me April first and so we still have a little bit
of time and some of the I just kind of picked a little bit of a variety of
stuff here but if you look at some of the vegetables as being leafy greens um
grown more for the green on them actually than the fruit more than likely
those will be a cool season vegetable so if you want to look for something that
that has more green on it and then the sure way is to go to the back of the
package and all the packages are um have several different um types of information
on one is they should be produced for the 2002 year and this one's kind of
printed on very lightly but you can see the 2002 lot 91 and so that's
telling you this is good seed current seed and then there's a lot of
information here about that particular type of plant here we're looking at
radishes and so there's a map of the United States you can kind of see where
New Mexico is on it and that color coincides over here too when you plant
so we're looking at March here which here we can actually get by, by a late
February planning and radishes will do quite well in this area so again
checking those seed packs to find what time of year those are to be planted at
and they'll say something about the plant being a cool-season plant and
that's what we want to shoot for so again these are what we want to look at
for a cool-season planting at this time of year
okay letter number two is from Jim and Jim is in T or C and he's asking he's
kind of knew the area and has gone to the nurseries and has found some plants
like lantana that looked real good in the nursery but he's worried about
bringing them outside into full exposure here during the early part of spring
late winter in the Las Cruses area so Jim what you're probably seeing, and I went
by one of the nurseries and this is a lantana and lantana loves the heat it
does quite well in the heat but it does not like cold and matter of fact it can
have some frost damage on it under freezing type temperatures so this plant
is being uh
probably forced to grow inside in a greenhouse area where it's getting
warmth and it's going to be filled out nice when our last frost date comes and
you can start putting these out but when you're in a nursery you do want to make
sure that you check with the nursery or garden center personnel to make sure
that the plant is adaptable to going outside at this time of year because a
lot of times even though they're cold hardy plants if they're kept inside a
greenhouse situation they can be kept artificially warm and put new growth on
and when they go outside you may have a 30- 40 degree drop in temperature and can
do quite a bit of damage to them so plants need to be acclimated to the area
and acclimated to the current temperatures so make sure the plants
that you get are acclimated to those outside temperatures so check with your
nursery personnel
okay our third letter is from Karen and Karen is here in Las
Cruces and she wants to know whether she should start her plants for the spring
either by seed or by transplant and Karen one of the things about seed is
that you can start your plants from seed and again we've talked about seed
packets and they give you a lot of information on it and one of the
information or part of the information on the back is what kind of spacings and stuff to plant
the plant at and how long it takes the plant to to grow and days to germination
and this one is about 10 to 14 days to germination from seed so
you're looking at a couple weeks of just waiting for the seed to come up and then
again letting the plant grow for a few weeks so it may be 8 to 12 weeks before
this particular broccoli might even have a chance of putting any edible heads on
it so if you're using a transplant and this is Brussels sprouts which is
closely related to broccoli but Brussels sprouts and the use of a transplant
usually gives you a jump of somewhere about six to eight weeks on the season
so this plant already has a root system on it and the plant is growing has got growth
on it so you've already got that jump on the season so if you don't have the room
to start seeds with then the transplant is a better way to go a little bit more
expensive but it is putting into production right away so i would go with
transplants if time and space is a constraint
