The Hort Report: With first day of spring coming, think about where to plant cool-season vegetables

Many of you are starting to see vegetable seeds in stores and in catalogs you get in the mail or online. 

In the late 1960s through the late 1980s, the South Shelby FFA would sell Vitality Garden & Flower Seed door to door as a fundraiser to help pay for the annual FFA spring banquet.

Herman Peeper was the advisor, and every South Shelby FFA student sold seed while a member. As a former student and later co-advisor with Herman, I really enjoyed this. 

Students would take a catalog and order form with them and contact people. They showed the catalog, talked about the seed and answered questions. They wrote orders and turned them in a vo-ag class the next day. Herman collected the orders and sent them to Vitality Seed. In about a week, when you came to vo-ag class, there would be the order to take to your customer for spring planting. 

Students learned several skills as they met people, talked about a product and the benefits of buying it, wrote the order, turned it in, delivered the seed, collected money and turned the money in.

Sometimes people asked questions about the seeds and how best to plant them, or how to grow, harvest and store the vegetables and flowers the seeds produce. You can see how great this fundraiser was.

With daylight time getting longer, the first day of spring is only a few weeks away. So start to think about what and where you will be planting your cool-season vegetables.

Start planting cool-season vegetables between March 10-20 in north Missouri, then you can start eating fresh vegetables sooner than later. You can also double crop after the first harvest and even have a fall vegetable garden, too.

Cool-season vegetables to plant are radishes, lettuce, onions, peas, beets, collards, mustard, carrots, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, turnips, potatoes and chard. 

Many cool-season vegetables can be double-cropped once you harvest them the first time. I will then rotate them to another spot in the garden where I had planted various cool-season vegetables. 

Like with other vegetables, you shouldn’t plant cool-season vegetables in the same place after the first time you harvest them. 

When planting cool-season vegetables, plant them in a part of the garden that dries out the fastest. I like to plant them on the upper side of the garden so the water will drain away from the soil better to help it dry out faster.

Once the spring thaw comes, I rake the soil with a garden rake about a quarter- to half-inch deep, allowing the soil to dry out and warm up before I go back in a couple of days. Raking down into the soil another quarter- to half-inch, I do it a couple more times. I work the soil so the top two to three inches of soil is dried out so I can plant my cool-season vegetables.

When planting in raised beds, I do the same thing — work the soil and then add potting soil in the rows. After making the rows either in the garden soil or raised beds, I plant the cool-season vegetable seeds and cover them with more potting soil, mixing in some topsoil. This soil mix will allow the seeds to have a great place to germinate by combining heat, water, air and soil to allow the seeds to sprout and grow.

I really appreciate all of your questions in the past and look forward to them in the future. Contact me at 573-588-2040, sci63468@hotmail.com or on Facebook at Greenwell’s Greenhouse Group, or at Shelby County Implement in Shelbina, Mo. Ask me anytime you see me. This way we can visit and ask each other follow-up questions. This helps me with topics for The Hort Report.

Pat Greenwell is the owner of Shelby County Implement in Shelbina, Mo. He was a high school agriculture teacher for 11 years. He has taught adult vocational agriculture since 1987. He also is a research assistant at the Truman State University Ag Department Farm.