Picking Vegetables to Plant
Picking the vegetables you’ll plant in your vegetable garden depends on your goals and needs:
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- The species, varieties, or cultivars you’ll plant.
- Choice of growing from seed or planting starts and transplants.
- The right time to plant in your climate and for your site.
- Choices that yield the amount of fruit, berries, root vegetables, and leafy greens your family needs.
- Disease and pest resistance.
Vegetable Selection Factors
Consider these factors when choosing vegetables: Which species to grow, how much you’ll harvest, planting as seeds or as nursery starts, planting time and conditions, and resistance to plant diseases.
While both options often yield good results, a wider choice of plants generally is available as seed, including those with characteristics that make them especially desirable. These include natural disease resistance, varied fruit color, size, or vigor and growth habit.
Selecting the right vegetables and healthy transplant stock also defies many long-held gardening myths. Despite all the hype, seeds planted in prepared soil routinely outperform nursery starts, and small, young plants usually are a better choice rather than large ones.
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On the other hand, tender care and good growing conditions from germination until transplanting mark high among the benefits of planting seedlings from commercial vegetable growers that are offered by your garden center.
Among the seedlings available each spring are popular varieties that your garden center’s staff know will perform well in the local conditions found in your region.
Make your selections based on the next factor, the timing of plantings. The widest range of nursery starts often are available for about 6–8 weeks from the time that the soil becomes workable. Thereafter, the selection becomes limited; by the time that the season has become advanced, there may be few vegetable seedlings from which to choose.
Healthy Rather Than Big
For economy and best results, turn away from transplant stock in large containers that have already begun to develop flowers or fruit. These plants have been held too long, and they become stunted. Their roots are crowded into their pots, often encircling the containers and choking off nutrition and water to the inner roots. Avoid the desire for an “instant garden,” and choose instead to plant young seedlings in multiple-pack containers.
It’s far better to pick young plants ready to transplant than to try to rescue stunted large plants. In a matter of a few weeks, the young starts will establish healthy root systems in your garden’s beds, roots superior to those of the larger plants. In a month, they’ll exceed transplants of large species in size, flower production, and fruit development.
When planting from seed, if conditions allow, plant directly into garden soils for the same reason rather than start plants in pots and transplant them to the garden. Some species transplant poorly. Others will lag behind their seed-sown rivals due to transplant shock. Conditions where seedlings are grown in greenhouses rarely match real-world garden temperatures and soils.
Enjoy an economical and healthier garden by planting right.
Succession Plantings
If you want to plant in succession or plant before or after your garden store offers stock, sowing seed may be your only choice [see Planting Vegetable Successions]. Note the length of time required for the seedling to grow to maturity and set fruit; a quick reference is the seed package or plant stake, but you also can find and refer to specific information for each vegetable plant commonly planted in home gardens [see Vegetable Plants].
For seed, choose from varieties offered by major growers, avoiding generic- or house-branded seed. From nursery starts, choose vigorous, immature, healthy seedlings free of damaged foliage or broken stems. Gently slip each plant out of its planter to inspect its roots, avoiding those that are rootbound, and skip over plants that already have begun to flower or bear immature fruit; most such seedlings will remain stunted after transplanting and generally will produce less fruit.
Planting Throughout the Garden Season
While nursery-grown transplants are plentiful in garden stores during spring, the selection often is spotty later in the gardening season. Vegetable gardeners that plant sequential plantings in their gardens need seed on hand, giving them choices of the right varieties for late spring, summer, and autumn.
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