When do crops grow

Excited to start your spring garden? A solid garden plan considers factors like plant arrangement, sun exposure, and what you actually like to eat. If you want to start your plants from seed, I recommend these seed suppliers. But for a head start, you may also order seedlings from a Tower Farm. Are you running low on Mineral Blend or something else?

Click over to the Tower Garden store to restock. If your garden has been sitting in storage since last growing season, it may need a quick cleaning. Once you have your seeds, follow these tips to germinate them successfully.

When your seedlings grow to about three inches tall and have roots protruding from the rockwool, you can plug them into your Tower Garden.

If you start with seedlings from a Tower Farm, you can plant them right away. Cold season crops are pretty tough. But if you anticipate a stretch of freezing weather, consider heating your Tower Garden. And covering your plants with this blanket overnight can also protect them from frosts. I hope this guide gets you gardening — and enjoying delicious harvests — earlier than you expected this year. Jack Algiere is renowned in the world of agriculture. While that can feel like a waste of space for some gardeners, the benefits to your soil are well worth it.

There are many reasons to grow a cover crop and hundreds of varieties to choose from, so how do you know which is right for your garden? Well, that depends on what you are trying to achieve and the effort you are willing to invest. Even the weeds that grow in your garden can be considered a cover crop if you manage them properly. Cover cropping is all about thinking ahead and managing as you go.

Jack calls it choosing your own adventure. As a general rule, cover crops are sown in a garden space after the season for edible crops has ended. Once your summer crops are spent and removed from the space, the cover crop is grown within the space during the fall and winter season.

There are three basic families of cover crops, and they each offer specific benefits and challenges:. Some of the varieties within each family are perennial and some are annual. Like other plants, their life cycle will often depend on your hardiness zone. Seen here are cover crops in two of my raised beds at the GardenFarm. The bed in the foreground has been cut down and is ready to turn in to the soil. The cover crop in the background is still growing and ready to be cut down. If you want to add to the nutrient bank in your soil, plan ahead to incorporate legumes or grasses as a cover crop at the end of the summer season.

Both these families of cover crops draw more photosynthesis than others, so when you allow them to grow to the proper stage and incorporate the plant material back into the soil, the nutrients held in the plants are released into the soil food web to feed your future edible crops. If your soil is compacted, the deep roots of grain cover crops will break up and aerate the soil naturally, while also adding organic material and nutrients.

You can watch the episode of Growing a Greener World where I demonstrated cover crops in my raised beds — what they look like and how I incorporated them back into the soil. That episode focused on traditional cover cropping, but there are many variations you can use in your garden. Some cover crops can require time and a little brute force to work in. Winter rye is a common option, in part because it will grow through even harsh winters. Austrian winter peas can be much easier to work in, but they provide many of the same nutrient and soil protection benefits you may need from a cover crop.

Red clover is so resilient, you can broadcast the seed onto frozen ground. The seed will survive ongoing cold temperatures and will sprout as temperatures warm and the soil softens. This is known as frost seeding. As long as you broadcast the seeds before the first sign of weeds sprouting, the red clover will have time to germinate, grow and be ready to work into the soil before you plant your edibles after the last risk of frost has passed.

So, when is a cover crop ready to work into the soil? Jack explains that the plant is storing up nutrients right through the point at which it sets flower. The sugars produced by the plant are focused in the flower. While in that form, everything you want transferred from the flower into the soil food web is at the perfect stage. When a flower transforms to seed, the sugars in the flower turn to starch. As a starch, the energy and nutrient benefit are no longer available to the soil.

So, the ideal time to cut down a cover crop is after flowering and before the seeds set. Sometimes there is an unavoidable gap between two long-lived crops. For instance, overwintering brassicas are usually harvested by mid-spring, a month or two before summer staples such as tomatoes are ready to go in.

You can even use intercropping principles to sow into gaps in rows of crops that are currently growing to gain a head start. For instance, sow fast-growing vegetables a few weeks before an overwintered crop is harvested in spring, and the catch crop will be ready to grow into the vacated space just at the right time. All of the above are forms of succession planting, which keeps the same piece of ground productive for as much of the year as possible.

Steely determination and a watchful eye is needed for successful succession planting, because you must always be ready to pull out plants that are just past their best to make way for fresh new seeds and seedlings. Sow and plant until you can sow and plant no more. Exact timing of your plantings will vary depending on where you live. That means you will have sturdy, well-grown seedlings ready to slot in as soon as there is space, whether due to harvesting or a crop failure, without wasting time starting anew from seed.

Not everything will grow well this way — carrots and peas, for instance, do not transplant well — but for most crops, forward planning like this is a real time-saver.