7 Vegetables to Start Now | Early Spring Gardening Tips: P. Allen Smith

even though it's cold it's time to plant some of my favorite vegetables i don't know about you but i love asparagus and if you want to be successful with growing some asparagus you've got to get your bed right because it's going to be around for a long time just look at this ridge here that i threw up three years ago and we planted crowns of asparagus and you can't believe the asparagus that it produces every year this is uc 157 and was developed by the university of california and what i'm planting over here is a new variety which is called uc72 mary's granddaughter and these are the most interesting looking crowns you'll see this is what an asparagus root is called and what i do is i buy these as two-year-old crowns and you plant them in the early spring and it's the stalk of the asparagus that we eat and what will happen is they'll come up and emerge and we'll cut them off at a desirable length and eat them and then there'll be others that will leave and those stalks will come up and make a very soft diaphanous foliage and this whole ridge will be nothing but that very feathery like foliage of the entire summer so what i've done here is i'm throwing up a two foot wide ridge and i've already worked in some manure into it you want it about seven inches deep and i've taken some bone meal i'm going to add a little bit more you just want to sprinkle some bone meal down through the middle of it and then i have some wood ash i've already added some let me just add a little bit this is from the fireplaces and rather than lay those raw roots right on top of that you want to work that in just a little bit like this so what you want to do is then take those little spider-like crowns and you want to drop them in the ground you want seven inches of soil over the top you're going to place them about 14 to 16 inches apart and what you're going to do is you're going to harvest none of them the first year let the stalks come up and the next year you'll get bigger crop and you're only going to eat about 25 look at the size of that one that's a beauty there and you've got to figure out where you want them in your garden because you don't want to dig them up once you get them started now with them in place what i'm going to do is start pulling the soil back over the top of them just like this and i like to do it as soon as the soil can be worked in the spring while it's still cold and you can order these asparagus plants or you can find them at a feed and seed store dormant like that as soon as it begins to warm up you'll start seeing these little green finger like sprouts coming up and that's going to be your first sign that your asparagus is doing well it's going to be successful i just want to show you this little eight foot square raised bed i can't tell you how much i can grow in this space yeah i got a big vegetable garden here but these little raised beds man you can't believe how much you can grow and how early you can start you see peas particularly a variety like this one called alaska you can plant these really early i've got this accordion trellis that i'm pulling across actually cutting across bisecting this square and i'll pin it on either side and in the middle so it doesn't fall over but i really want to show you how i'm planting these peas you see i love peas because they're beautiful plants they have gorgeous sort of white flowers all over them and then soon to follow the flower you get these wonderful pea pods and this is a great pea to shell and put in the freezer or eat fresh and with this particular kind of tea it grows on a trellis and this is about uh the length of this trellis is about 12 feet so what what i'm going to end up with is about you know 24 25 feet of peas on either side which is a lot all right so i've got my my trough dug for them let me show you these peas these things are really easy to grow they're big seed anytime you've got a big seed like this it's kind of fun to get kids involved i'm going to open this up just so you can see them you want to plant them about an inch to an inch and a half deep and about an inch apart and what i do is just take them and kind of drop them in the ground like this you don't have to be particular about it so maybe a little too close than others and what's going to happen is these little pea seeds are going to germinate in about eight to ten days depending on how warm it is and you're going to cover them up with about an inch to an inch and a half of soil we'll just keep dragging them along here like this all the way to the end now i'll do the same thing coming along here now the thing to realize about these peas this particular variety is going to grow to about two and a half feet which is perfect for the size of this trellis and they'll grow up all through this they have little tendrils that will hang on to it then the pods on alaska are about two inches long now all you have to do here is just cover them up again you just want to cover them up with about an inch of soil and they'll be climbing up here and it'll just be a beautiful backdrop for whatever i want to plant here which i'm thinking maybe some arugula and maybe some of that red sale lettuce so vegetable gardening can not only be rewarding from a culinary standpoint but also from an aesthetic standpoint just look at all of this garland i don't know about you but i love the flavor of garlic and cooking you see what's amazing about is you can take a bulb of garlic like this and you can break it into the individual cloves and that's all i'm doing here i'm just peeling it back and breaking it into the cloves each one of these bulbs you know i might get a dozen cloves out of it maybe 15 sometimes 20. you're just all i'm doing is taking the outer husk of the garlic off like that and you can do this at home the garlic that you buy at the grocery store you can peel it off like that and take a single clove and then right at the base you'll see that's the basal plate and that's where the roots begin to emerge and what you do is in the early early spring really late winter i like to plant my garlic you want to plant it where you get good drainage and i plant these cloves about six inches apart and about two inches deep and in about 100 days i'll have garlic to harvest i mean what's amazing is one of these bulbs will make you know 15 to 20 new bulbs of garlic so you can see why i had so much left over and you can understand why i don't want to waste any of it so why don't i take some of these that i've already broken into cloves and are ready for planting and show you how i plant them it's really simple all right so if you take a look here i've got this furrow that i was talking about i've actually put two little furrows down the middle of this ridge and what you want to look for are cloves that are firm the flesh is white they're not bruised but mainly they're not soft or already dried up somebody's already beginning to put out little little shoots at the top and then all you do is just lay them along here about six inches apart and then you just push them in the ground about two inches like i'm doing here with my finger see that push them in put the basil part the basal plate down then you come back and just pull the soil back over the top of them and then what i like to do is take some organic fertilizer give them a little a little food so all along this row as i plant them i'm going to do that what's interesting about garlic to me is that here in zone seven i can grow two crops i can do a fall crop i can do a spring crop and the other great thing about it is if the greens you get these beautiful greens that will come up you can actually cut the greens off and use the greens in cooking if you find these tips helpful share them with a friend we'd love to hear from you i like to get an early start on my spring gardening and i like to be creative too just take a look at this raised bed it's eight feet by eight feet square and what i've done is across the center of it i've placed a trellis and on either side of that trellis i've planted peas and those peas have already started coming up so i'm really excited now what i'm doing is i'm drawing some rose across the bed diagonally like this with my little warren hoe like this i don't want to get up here where my peas are i'm going to plant spinach now this is a bloomsdale hybrid that matures fairly quickly what i'm going to do is i'm going to plant this organically grown seed in these rows now there's enough seed in here to plant like a 34 to 35 foot row so there's plenty of seed so what i'm going to do is i'm going to plant some of these seed only about a half inch deep and i'm planting them anywhere from a half inch to four inches apart this spinach will germinate in about 10 days and i want to make sure that i've got enough seed for the entire bed so i don't cover them up until i get all the seed planted make sure it's equally distributed spinach is a wonderful vegetable to grow i grow it every spring and it's rich in so many vitamins a c b complex it's also a very beautiful vegetable these will have really dark glossy green leaves and that's in part due to well just the genetics of spinach and also the soil look at the soil i've created here it's really rich and humus and if i squeeze it even though it's moist like this it still falls apart that's a good sign i've got it just the way it needs to be in the soil i use some of the basic clay that i have here already but i also integrated some sand helped break up the clay i've used leaf molds ground up leaves i've used rice hulls anything that will decay and make the soil much looser and easy for these plants to grow in you know i love growing my own vegetables and one of the easiest ones to grow is one of the most beautiful it's shard swiss chard i'm planting some ruby shards you can start really early with it and that's what i like it's out here it's cold it's misty but you put these seed in the ground and they're gonna germinate within seven to ten days now what i do is i take my favorite hoe i draw a little line right along the back side of this bed this is a raised bed that i've been working the soil up and getting it right for about three years what you want is a soil when you reach in there and you hold it together like that and you squeeze as hard as you can if it falls apart you got the right thing going if it holds together in a ball you got too much clay in it so remember that all right now we're going to start planting this shard i'm just going to walk along here and just drop them in i just want to make sure that i've got enough seed to do this entire row there's different varieties of chard there's a white stalk shard there's one called rainbow lights that has a really beautiful range of yellows and salmon and apricot colored stems so what i've done is i've planted a 20-foot row of this the soil is so moist and looks like we're going to get a little rain so i'm not going to worry about actually watering them in but if it was really dry you'd probably want to water them in and in about 10 days these little guys will begin to germinate and in 60 days i'll be able to start harvesting shard to use in some of my recipes i'm just dragging about a half inch of soil over the top of these little seed and i don't mind the fact that they're not in a precise row i like the fact that some of them are off the center point and what i'll do is if they're too close together i'll come along here once they germinate and i'll pull some of them up and i might transplant them or i might just throw them away or i might wash them off and throw them in a salad now look at it over here these are some i planted back in the fall and we hadn't had a hard enough winter to knock these back you can see shard can take below freezing temperatures because we've already dropped down to 24 degrees and look how good these plants look now i went through here and i pulled off a lot of the old stems around the base but it's still performing beautifully what you want to do if you want to eat it you want to reach in there and you want to pull off those young tender stalks if you want to do a flower arrangement what you want to do is pull some of those big broad leaves like that now take a look at that that would look good in just about any kind of flower arrangement so the thing with some of these vegetables you need to think about is not just to relegate it to the kitchen although it is delicious and nutritious but use it in other ways decorative ways in the house i think it's an outstanding plant you know there's just something about potatoes that i love i love to eat them and i love to grow them and even though most of us don't have enough room to grow a lot of potatoes you can grow potatoes in a bushel basket i'm going to show you how to do that the first thing you do is you start with some potatoes and you can buy seed potatoes at a feed store or some current farm store and i like to plant my potatoes by valentine's day if i can because potatoes really like it cool now these are some potatoes that i had left over from last year and they got a little shriveled and they don't look that great but this is a variety called a kennebec and what you want to do when you're growing some of your own potatoes you can use potatoes that you buy at the grocery store as long as they have they've gotten a little old and you can actually see an eye emerging like this what happens with potato growers is they'll actually put a retardant on potatoes and those potatoes are unlikely to grow and make new potatoes so that's why you want to look for this now what i would do on a potato like this is there's an eye here and there's an eye here and i would cut that potato in half and what i'll do is i'll get two potato plants out of that what i'm going to do here today is i'm just going to cut my potatoes in pieces that will allow for me to have as many pieces of potatoes as possible that have an eye and i'm laying the cut side up so that potato will dry you don't want to plant it immediately in the ground you want it to sit you can sit for 24 hours just like that you don't want them to dry up you do want that to callous over just a little bit you don't want to plant it wet now if a potato is rotten or soft you don't want to mess with it and on some of these little bitty ones like that little guy right there i just go ahead and plant it just the way it is and i wouldn't cut it into two pieces so i cut this potato you can see and it's got some rod in it so i'll just take the knife and i'm gonna cut that rod out like that there's no reason why if that dries that that potato won't grow so when you plant the potatoes in the ground you see this is a hundred foot row i'm gonna plant those pieces when they dry two feet apart so i can put 50 pieces in here if i can plant this full row of potatoes there's no telling how many bushels of potatoes that'll produce or i can take two pieces of those potatoes and i can put them in here and plant them at about eight inches deep and that's what i'll do and you won't believe the number of potatoes that you can dump out of that bushel basket fun project for kids you know i love growing tomatoes and i try to get an early start and that's when my greenhouse comes in really handy you see what i'm doing right now i'm just taking some soil putting it around this tomato this is a wonderful variety of tomato called better bush tomato and i planted them in here only a week ago and just look at the difference in the size of this tomato this one didn't get planted same age but by having a larger container to grow in look how much growth i've gotten in a week with this plant and it's already got some little buds in fact a flower has already opened here on this side so i'm really excited what i'm doing is i'm taking the side leaves off and what what's interesting about tomatoes is you really want to plant them almost 80 percent into the soil so when i planted these i planted them really deeply and now what i'm doing is i'm adding even more soil because what will happen is the roots will grow out of the side of the stem and you'll make a much stronger plant you want as large and developed a root system as you possibly can okay so i've got these all ready and i'll keep fertilizing them and keeping them consistently moist and they'll just continue to grow and i've got some of these guys over here that need to go into larger pots now one of the things i really enjoy doing in my greenhouse in the winter is starting all kinds of seedlings but particularly tomato plants and what i try to do is plant the seed about six weeks before i think i'm going to move the plant outside what i do is i use these little discs these are peat moss discs you can see it starts like this a little wafer when you add water it expands and it's got this little netting around it which holds the soil mix together and the roots can grow in this you form a little root ball with the plant and what you do is you just take the seed and what's convenient is that a packet of these seed this is brandywine tomato by the way just drop a little seed in there and cover it up like that with about a half inch of soil now what i'll do is these will germinate and after they have about four leaves on them i'll bump them up to a larger peat pot like this but when i do that i'm going to make sure that i tear into this little fibrous netting because i want those roots to be able to grow out and fill up this entire peat pot now the great thing about these you can plant them directly in the soil so what i can do is i can take these and just tear into the sides of them tear the sides off they'll decompose naturally they just become part of the soil the soil structure and the plant will just keep on growing and when i plant them in the ground i'll i'll take all these lower leaves off and i'll bring the soil right up to the neck where you only have 20 percent of the plant standing again that goes back to what i did here you get a really strong root system that way and one of the things you want to make sure you do is you want to make sure that these stay consistently moist they can't sit in standing water i'll cover this with this little plastic top so it's going to create its own little greenhouse environment i want to make sure the temperatures stay in the 70s here if you don't have that at home you at least want to put them on a warming mat that you can pick up at a local garden center because the key is the soil must be warm those little tomato seeds will not germinate in cold soil you know i just love this time of year i get really invigorated i get kind of frantic actually because there's so much to do but i tell you this area of my garden is designed in a way that helps me sort of manage my anxiety because it's it's really contained it's only 24 feet this way and about 18 feet here that's about 430 square feet but the key really is these raised beds and i put these raised beds in you're not going to believe this about 10 years ago and they really held up beautifully but what i'm doing right now is every year i'm in the soil a little bit and i do that because i've got a lot of humus in here and it breaks down and so the soil level goes down also by adding you know some sort of a blend that actually has some activators in it it really helps and what i mean by activators are things like microrhizae they actually help the plants grow and what i'm doing here is i'm just integrating some of that fresh soil into my old soil like this when i first planted these beds or let's say when i first added the soil i used one part of existing garden soil that i had which had a bit of clay in it i had one part sand that i added to help break up some of that clay and then i added a lot of humus probably more than one part humus and each year i add more humus and it's really worked very very well it's all organic so i only use organic fertilizers when i fertilize my plants now let's talk a minute about the beds themselves in the space which is very limited i actually have eight different beds i have four squares and four triangles it makes a really cool design to look in here you can mix it up you can make it all the same each year you know it's just kind of a fun exercise to come up with something a little different so what i did is i made sure that i started with a 2 by 10 piece of lumber and you can see right here the 2x10 lumber and i used a western cedar and it's really held up well and what we did is we used wood screws you can see here and here the wood screws were attached you can see that the corners are mitered like this and they split a little bit but hey you know i think these are going to last a long time i mean look over here on the side if i dig down the 10 inches on the inside of this board okay yeah it's rotted a little bit but it's still really solid i mean i can expect probably another five years out of these beds 15 years of raised beds can you imagine all the vegetables you can grow in that length of time now take a look at this little apple tree this variety is a wine sap one that we're all familiar with i planted this last year and it didn't really grow that much this past year because we had a really hot hot summer but it's time to prune them i try to prune them at the end of winter and the beginning of spring and so what i'm doing here is i'm going to take off some unnecessary limbs because the idea here is to grow this tree up to have a nice broad canopy with strong limbs that can support a heavy fruit crop as the tree begins to mature so what i'm going to do is i'm going to use a pair of really sharp bypass pruners and when i say bypass that means that the cutting blade bypasses this base blade here to the side when you prune you want to use the the cutting side at the bottom of a stem this size and you just want to take it off like that nice clean cut is what you're after and you want to make sure that you leave a little bit of the branch collar you see this wrinkled uh rounded formation at the base of this limb or where the limb was that's the branch collar and that's what gives the limb strength over time and what will happen now is that branch collar will grow over this wound and cover it within a year and i'm just going to go along here and i'm going to clean this up a little bit and take off some of these little stubs and see that limb is really not one that it needs or this one or this one and i've brought it up to a point where you'll have three major limbs as this tree begins to grow all right now one of the rules in pruning is always remove the three 3ds dead diseased and damaged and what i've noticed here i've got a diseased limb here that is dead and i'm going to take that off and i'm going to take it off just above an outward facing dormant bud so i'm going to take it off here just like that and what will happen is when spring erupts there will be a bud will form here and a limb will grow out here and it will grow out not in now i'm looking up here and i'm noticing that i've got a cocoon of some sort of pest that'll be some kind of a caterpillar that will come along here and chew on this little tree but i noticed over here on this side as well you'll see here a beneficial insect that's the housing or cocoon of a praying mantis that's attached to the stem so we want to keep that now when you choose fruit trees you need to keep in mind chill hours and what chill hours are the number the minimum number of hours required for the plant to set flower buds and actually flower because without flour you're not going to have fruit and apples require a certain number of days that are cold or certain number of hours where it's cold that's typically in the 40 low 50 degree range and if you don't have those you're not going to get any blooms to open now wine sap for example will grow from zone four through eight and it needs about 800 chill hours to be able to set those blooms you know i'm big on mulch i use a lot of it in a lot of different areas and i even use it in my raised beds and i like using just this pine straw it's a great mulch and one of the reasons for using a mulch is that you want to cut down on weeds so this bed has been fully prepared and you can see how nice and loose the soil is now what i'm going to do this is a little technique that i learned when i had my landscape business is that you go ahead and you just get everything smoothed out in the soil just right and then you go ahead and apply the mulch now one of the reasons that i like to use a mulch well there's many reasons i like to use a mulch but one of them is that it keeps soil temperature even which is important so in the summer it actually keeps the soil cool and in the winter it can keep the plants a little warmer now you see we're in raised beds so the plants are going to stay a little cooler because the soil is cooler which is just fine because what i'm planting today are cool weather vegetables now this tool is called a dibbler and i want to show you how the dibbler works because in this bed what i want to plant is swiss chard so i'm taking the swiss chard if you look at each one of these pots there's at least three little swiss chard plants in them and what i'm going to do is just cut the plastic off just like this and i'm just going to take it out of this little peat pot and i love the little peat pots because they're biodegradable and i'm just going to break these little plants into three parts i'm just going to take the dibbler and i'm going to make a hole like that and that just pop in my little shard and put the mulch in around it like this last year i had some growing in one of my raised beds one of my larger raised beds and it was spectacular all summer long you had these really long stalks of ruby red color with big leaps i mean it was it was as beautiful as any flower i could have grown you know whether i use all the shard or not it's going to be an eye-popping display throughout the entire season now all i have to do is water these little guys in and i'm gonna have a beautiful raised bed in no time if you like this video be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel and be sure to ring the bell for notifications [Music]

Channel: P. Allen Smith

Views: 380,469

Keywords: Garden Home, P. Allen Smith, organic gardening, how to garden, p allen smith garden home, gardening (interest), gardening tips, spring garden, spring garden planning, moss mountain farm, raised bed gardening, garden tips, winter gardening, march garden, raised beds, cold hardy vegetables, spring garden preparation, garden design, spring gardening tips, asparagus growing, peas, planting garlic from cloves, spinach from seed, swiss chard growing, starting tomatoes from seed

Id: k1R4b-fYEaM

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020