ALL of the Crops We Are Starting NOW in March!

what's going on everyone today I got a ton to plant so I'm going to be showing you what you can plant for your garden right now in March let's go so when it comes to merch March is a lot of things to a lot of people but to me March is planting month and March is a season when you're going to be starting a lot of your early season stuff your cold weather crops but you also are going to be starting a lot of your warm weather stuff as well that take longer to mature uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through all the stuff we're planned but first I got to get some seed starting mix moistened up here first thing you always want to do if you're new to gardening you'll uh you'll definitely benefit from this but if you've been watching this channel you've already heard me say this you got to pre moisten your seed starting mix have to have to have to now when it comes to the seed starting mix we're using we're using our go-to we actually found this works very well for us it's a 50% blend of hydrated cocoa core and 50% blend of promix it's promix high paracity with micro added micro Riz is the beneficial fungi that thrive in soil they create a symbiotic relationship with plant roots they go out and they actually help the plant roots obtain nutrients and water so they're really important to have and uh and so we're we're combining two soilless growing mediums together and what we get from that is we get really great texture I really enjoy the texture of a 50/50 blend but as I've always said gardening is not a one- siiz fits-all solution that's just what we use so by all means test you know test and find out what works for you second thing we did prior is we gave it a good sift now most prixes have already been pre-sifted I like to do it as just a good measure I like a real fine seed starting mix I don't like a lot of chunks in mine so a lot of the wood bits and particles and chunks should always be sifted out we've got a video on how we did that uh we've done we've made like a little at home siiv just shake it around get all the wood chip bits a especially if you're not using something pre-sifted like I said promix generally is the reason why you want to pre moisten your mix is because as you can tell I dumped all that water on and even now it didn't just readily absorb it doesn't absorb really fast when when soil is super super dry it has a tendency to kind of avoid absorbing water it doesn't really like it at first so by pre moistening what you're going to do is you're going to basically incorporate water into that soil so it's a little more accepting of it when you go to water your seeds in the future all all right so we got our trades that we're going to be starting in and these are brand new to us we actually fell in love with these so much that we started carrying them over at Mig gardner.com now these are the bootstrap farmer seed starting trays now these are the four cells crazy rigid you can actually stand on these suckers not that I recommend it but you can and they're really rigid we got our six cells here these are going to be great for our cold weather crops like our cauliflower cabbage broccoli stuff like that stuff that's not going to be in there all that long and we're not going to transplant it again cuz I don't want to move from here into something like this that's just a waste of time and space I'd rather start something in here that's going to grow in here for about 5 to 7 weeks and then it's going to grow go from here right into the garden as soon as it's warm enough so these are going to hold our cold weather stuff then we have here a 72 cell tray this sucker is amazing so rigid like this thing is really heavy duty seed starting tray holds it like not breaking that sucker dishwasher safe as well so cool like like I said fell in love with these made in the USA can't get any better quality and then we have our 3-in pots so these are going to be for like our onions we always multi- our onions so when we sew our onions we don't put one seed in each cell we'll talk more about it when we start sewing but we don't put one seed in each cell it just takes a lot of space and space is a premium especially when you're growing mostly indoors and so a lot of these because we're in a greenhouse right now they're still going to go in a grow room because it's still far too cold at night we're just out here cuz it's nice weather but we're not going to put a single seed in each cell we're going to put like about 30 seeds in a 3-inch pot that way we're getting you know 10 20 times as many seeds planted in the same amount of space we're going to start with our multi- stuff now the process of multi- sewing is awesome because what it allows you to do is allows you to start some stuff that you wouldn't normally start indoors because it might not transplant all that well and what we're going to do is we're going to get an earlier start meaning we're going to get that much earlier of a harvest but it also allows us to again grow some stuff that we wouldn't normally grow indoors stuff like your root crops right so beets is a prime example of this we're going to multi- SEO our beets and when we multi so beets we're basically planting about three to four seeds per cell and that's why we're using these bootstrap farmer deep four cells here because it's going to allow a lot of room for root development a lot of room for those seedlings to actually develop and we're not going to thin we're not actually going to take we're not going to take out seedlings like we normally would you see if we plant something like you know a tomato seed we're going to plant maybe two seeds in each cell there's not enough room in here for two tomato seeds to grow up for for 5 to seven weeks it's not going to happen only one can grow in here and then after that it's going to need to be transplanted from here into like something like this or preferably something like this and that's just one plant versus multi-one what you're doing is you're allowing three to four plants to grow up in the same space and you're going to take that plant that that cell pack those plants I should say move them directly out into the garden and that's how they're going to mature they're going to grow like that and they're going to form their own individual beets right there and there're basically going to be a little clump of beets that are formed from that one cell pack you put in the garden it's really handy to grow a lot of plants in a small space one of the cool things about these trays is the fact they have these slits on the side bootstrap farmer created these slits to actually air prune The Roots what you'll notice is when Roots get confined and they start to spin around and around and around they get what's called root bound and that's actually stress it's almost like your muscles over time when you're doing something repetitive it's called muscle memory and that muscle memory of a of a root can go coil around and around and when you plant out in the garden sometimes it it has a hard time breaking that muscle memory with root pruning or air pruning what happens uh is those air pruned Roots they actually fork and they divide and it creates a much more spider Webby root system rather than a you know continuous coil so it actually transplants out into the garden better as well which is awesome so we're going to take these beets and we're basically just going to put like if you see the eyes on a coconut that's kind of how I always describe it right or like you grip a bowling ball right you might grip a bowling ball this way right just kind of Pop those holes in there all right second crop we're starting right now is asparagus asparagus is one of my favorite crops to grow and it has a very aggressive deep root system and so we're only going to plant about two seeds per cell here but we're putting them in these in these deep four packs here because again we're going to let these grow for probably the next 2 3 months in these cell packs here really get them established get them established early as well because they're a perennial the more established they can be the faster you're going to get them to grow faster you're going to get a harvest in your garden and because these need a couple years to actually get growing before you can Harvest sooner you can start them the better so I'm putting them in here in these four cell packs and they're going to do awesome in these again too because the the the cells actually have air pruning slits in them um it's really going to help to again get that wiry root system going so once I transplant out in the garden they're going to be ready to rock all right we're just going to cover these up with a little bit of soil get them watered in so next thing we're going to be starting is our cold weather stuff now our cold weather we stuff it's super important that you remember this that cold weather stuff should be started early because it doesn't like warm weather and a lot of gardeners make this mistake they they think well okay so my garden is typically think of like your main season right my main season might be July or August right so they'll say well I'll start my seeds in my garden when the weather warms up I'm going to put my cold weather stuff out early problem is those seeds won't germinate in Cold Soil they have a hard time germinating in anything below 45 50° right now the soil temperatures are still like right around freezing if not freezing and so because the nighttime temperatures still are below freezing those seeds are not going to germinate they're going to stay dormant your broccoli your cabbage your coliflower seeds will get into they're not going to germinate you want to start them now so you actually have a Seedling to move out into the garden and what that's going to do is going to allow that plant to grow during the cold weather see the seeds they don't like the cold weather but the plants do so it's a weird it's a weird phase right so we start them indoors or in a greenhouse to get them growing and we move them outside when the weather is still cold so they can grow slowly mature slowly and form a nice big plant get that really big structure to them to form all that beautiful fruit like in the case of our calab broccoli or our self- blanching cauliflower even our cabbages right we want a big healthy plant to provide us a big healthy Harvest so that's why we're starting those right now don't make the mistake of starting them in your garden later because what happens if you start them too late they're going to grow season's going to get warm and then basically they're going to they're going to go to seed or form fruit when they're still very young and that's going to form a very small Harvest for you so bigger Harvest means starting early quick tip for you guys there's some seeds that we're going to be succession sewing that's the process of starting some now and then in about one or two weeks we're going to start some more that means when we plant them out in the garden or we direct sew some stuff into the garden we're not going to have a harvest all at once you don't want you know 100 beets all at once unless of course you're canning but if you don't want 100 beets all at once you're going to succession sew if you don't want you know 100 heads of lettuce all at once you're going to succession sew and that means you're going to be harvesting some every week but you're not going to have everything all at once and so with like our lettuce and our spinach and stuff we don't want to start our entire Garden right now I see it all the time gardeners make this mistake of planting out way more than they're ever going to need and then they also say well I also plan on starting some later as well but they just have Trace space it's kind of like money burning a hole in your pocket like just because you have the tray space doesn't mean you need to plant more than you're going to use otherwise you're going to be met with that dilemma of wasting seed wasting soil and ultimately wasting a lot of time because if you are planning on starting stuff out in your garden like in the case of our spinach and our our lettuce it makes no sense to start a bunch more than we actually need to to so have that game plan in mind know what you're going to succession sew know what you're going to start all of like for instance our cauliflower and our broccoli and stuff it gets way too hot way too fast there's no way we're going to be able to start seeds directly in the garden for cauliflower and broccoli it's not going to happen so we're going to start all of our garden worth of cauliflower andol cauliflower and broccoli right now and our lettuce and our spinach we're only going to start maybe about 25% of our Garden's worth what we got to start right now is our Swiss chard we have our Rainbow Lights Swiss chard I absolutely love this variety super colorful incredible flavor and texture but it also grows from basically from spring when we plant it all the way to fall and uh it even tolerates the summer heat it is awesome never gets bitter never gets stringy it is just like awesome we have our cauliflower now cauliflower is a little bit tricky but the sooner you can start it the bigger it can get the better you're going to be so we got our self blanching cauliflower and our snowball cauliflower think about cauliflower that gets a little tricky most people kind of fail at is once it actually forms ahead is getting those leaves tied up to actually form a uh kind of form what they call a blanching cone that blanching cone keeps the sun away from that beautiful white head of cauliflower and it actually keeps it from turning yellow or brown and so what you want to do is form that blanching cone by tying those leaves up and that's going to get you that nice white beautiful head of cauliflower we also have here some broccoli I love broccoli this variety does best for us in early season that's the calib uh for fall we'll plant a lot of different varieties we'll plant our deio we'll plant our our walam uh 29 lots of different varieties at broccoli do very well in fall for us because we're growing we're going from warm weather into cold weather much more natural transition rather than cold weather snapping your fingers you're already in like you know a bikini um so it's like from 30 degrees to 80 degrees almost snap of a finger so I find calib does better with that shock than other varieties we also have our lettuce and our spinach so uh our lettuce and our spinach here I've got yep our lettuce and our spinach so these are the ones we're going to be uh kind of succession sewing it's only a small fraction of the lettuce we're going to be growing this year maybe about 25% of our total Garden's worth of lettuce and spinach but this is just kind of a good idea for what we're starting we got some American spinach we got some giant Noble spinach beautiful ones for kind of sautéing and in that's the giant Noble the other one is like baby spinach that's American spinach super tiny leaves super buttery beautiful oh it's amazing love it Hansen improved crisp head lettuce really beautiful crisp crunchy leaves wonderful in wraps and salad you know salad wraps and things like that um awesome also two different red lettuce here we got our super red roma all-time crowd favorite love it it's like everyone in our family loves that one and then ruby red leaf lettuce it's really great add some beautiful deep red kind of Ruby burgundy color into salads it's awesome now we also have our cabbages now cabbages is one of our favorite crops to grow it's so satisfying to get these big beautiful heads and we have here a purple seavoy so new so awesome so incredible I I love this one I fell in love with this the moment we started carrying it and so we're going to throw that in the garden this year um it's got like a green red ombre it's so cool have an all seasons cabbage it's like a mid-season variety of cabbage it's terrific handles the heat well does really great we have a Napa cabbage for making things like kimchi we're going to try that this year also have some Mammoth Red Rock we always grow Mammoth Red Rock it's like an it's a it's a staple for us and then another staple for us that we always always grow is awesome in things like just even just shredded cabbage coal sloth sourkraut whatever Copenhagen Market cabbage can't get any better than this I absolutely love this variety it's it's a go-to for us and uh like I said it's another staple one that we grow then we also have Georgia Southern collards it's a great one for us because we love wilting down collared greens so healthy really really nutritious it's a Powerhouse and it grows much like Swiss chard from basically spring all the way to fall so really really wonderful and what's great is if we happen to get some uh some cabbage moths typically they'll be attracted to the collards before they're attracted to other brass so we kind of also use it as a trap crop if we if we happen not get any collards okay that's fine we have other crops we can consume the collards become a great trap crop where then we can treat those those insects and keep them away from some of our other more kind of prized crops then we also have black magic kale this is one of the only KES we're going to be growing this year simply because we have so many other crops that we're going to be growing I want to save room in our garden and because we do a lot of juicing as well as dehydrating and sautéing It's a Wonderful all-purpose kale for that um so we're going to be growing that black magic kale but we've grown lots of other kale varieties as well and last but not least are the Brussels sprouts now we have two varieties of Brussels sprouts I love growing brussels sprouts they're the coolest most like alien looking plant in the entire Garden but we have here the cat skill Brussels sprout really giant sized brussels sprouts that form and then we also have the Red Bull brussel sprout that's actually a red bruss Sprout stays red even when cooked it is so cool Incredible and I like to eat my foods of color I really like to have my purples my greens my yellows my Reds I love to eat my foods of color and so uh we're going to be growing those two types of Brussels sprouts in this year's garden and those are all the cold weather crops that we're going to be starting right now all right now everyone's favorite crop tomatoes so we're going to be starting a lot of tomatoes this is not all of the tomatoes we're going to be starting but for this tray uh this is all I can really fit in this tray so I've got some ainol Tomatoes got some opula beautiful paste tomato love that our old German tomato it's a boled giant beef steak tomato like 2 to three lbs incredible one of our favorite Tomatoes The tyen menonite it's a uh really beautiful like like roses red beef steak beautiful beautiful um Supernova grape tomato awesome in salads the florade Tomato I love this especially in hot humid weather and Michigan gets some of that later on the fall so I like to have this or like later like late summer early fall I should say like to have that florade tomato cuz it does very well in the hot humid parts of Summer then we also have black prince it's a plum tomato but it's so beautiful it's this beautiful chocolate kind of burgundy colored tomato great white I grew this last year didn't do as well because it was very cold in the spring got a kind of a bad start but I want to grow this again cuz it's it's got such a creamy soft subtle uh soft supple I should say texture it's really it's not very mealy it's really creamy and smooth despite it being a beef steak mortgage lifter is like a staple for us love growing it it's an indeterminate Grows All Season has these gigantic red tomatoes awesome for All Purpose love it um then we also have German Johnson haven't grown this in a long time but a lot of people wanted me to grow that so I said you know we actually this was one of the first uh first we um we threw into our arloom garden when we first started gardening here on YouTube about 10 12 years ago we grew that variety and we haven't grown it since and so a lot of you wanted to see it back in the garden so I threw it back uh into our garden this year we also have Jubilee this is a determinant so uh this is a variety that uh we love to grow for salads for slicing it's really low acid very sweet it's uh it's kind of a crowd favorite for us and then Dr white cheese this is again just a staple we grow this every single year it is a beautiful beef steak it's kind of like a it's not quite yellow not quite Orange it's like kind of a mix of the two but it's so beautiful and they get huge like 2 three lbs they're massive so those are all of the tomatoes we're going to grow today but we're going to start a bunch more we'll bring you guys along for it obviously but um these are all going to go into these cell trays here now again like I said these are only going to last for maybe 5 to 7 weeks and they're going to get transplanted from there they're going to go into 3in pots or if things get warm enough stay in the way they've been we may just move these right from here into the garden I don't know it kind of I'll feel it out kind of you got to use Gardener's intuition but they may go into 3in pots or they may go directly into the garden all right so now we're going to start some onion seeds like I said when it comes to onion seeds we do not start a Single Seed per cell it's very wasteful on Space we wouldn't get that many seeds planted compared to how many onions we need in our garden for our family so what we do is we actually take these 3-in pots here it's really cool take these 3in pots pack them down a little bit nice and even and then what we'll do is we'll take our seeds we got here our Utah yellow these are like our Staples for our garden you want to make sure you're picking an onion that grows well in your zone I'm not talking Zone as in like zone 6 zone 5 zone four not your growing zone but your daylight Zone here in Michigan we're in what's considered a long day Zone that means our days are longer than if you were to go further south your days are slightly shorter and because onions are photosensitive that means they bulb based on the daylight period you want to go with an onion that's going to do well in your Zone otherwise if you were to grow a short day onion in a long day Zone you're going to get beautiful tops but no bulb development if you grow a long day onion in a short day Zone you're going to get beautiful beautiful tops but no bulb development and so you want to make sure you know where that zone is typically people say it's about the about the 42 43 degree latitude line that's just kind of hearsay obviously that you do your own research but for for the most part that's kind of the rough line where onions can be divided between a long day and a short day if you're north of the 43 degree latitude line you're going to be in a long day Zone if you're south of the 42° L 43° latitude line you're going to be a short day Zone um so we're going to grow the Utah yellow that does really well we got some zabon shallots now these are not these are in the onion family these are still in alium but these are shallots they're amazing it's like garlic and an onion had a baby and it's awesome love it love it also have some long white bunching onions here these are a crowd favorite for us love those and everything we also have our white sweet Spanish now again this is a long day and this onion does so well for us we'll we'll pretty consistently get 1 to two PB onions it's amazing baseball-sized onions and then we have the red burgundy and this is again just another staple for us we grow these three varieties in literally every Year's garden and it is beautiful because it's so deep red so this is definitely one that you definitely want to give a shot and um it's uh it's great they all have a really long shelf life too which I like because once you harvest an onion you don't want to have to eat them all within like one to two months so as long as you keep them cool and uh in kind of a dark location they'll typically stay for like 5 seven months all right so what we're going to do when we after we kind of press down the soil a little bit get it nice and level what we're going to do is we're going to take our onion seeds and this seems really crazy most gardeners are very scared to do this but take your seeds and we're going to sprinkle like 20 to 30 onion seeds over the top of that soil there and when those grow up we're not going to thin them we're going to let them all grow up just as one kind of like almost like a mat of onions growing up it'll look like grass growing up and then from there when they're ready to move out in the garden we're going to divide them out and they just separate right from the soil super easily now there's a lot of other crops like I said I'm not starting today just cuz we don't have enough time for everything but I'll tell you about them that way if you're curious you could at least start them so things like peas right so peas they're cold weather crop we're going to start ours directly in the ground I prefer not to start them inside but you definitely can because you're going to be transplanting them out hopefully pretty soon so you start those you also could start a lot of your herbs things like cilantro loves cold weather um a lot of your Basils Parsley Sage oregano chives anything like that those can all get started um also your flowers right so your marigolds um things that stay pretty small right you're not going to be moving your marigolds and stuff out really early so your marigolds they typically take a little while to germinate and then they take a little while to get growing things like zenas um your bachelor buttons things like that some of your more kind of upright flowers those do really really well if you start them right now I wouldn't start things that get really big really fast don't go for like I know we're starting some Tomatoes thinking like warm weather already sunflowers are a warm weather flow but they would do horribly if you started them right now like even if you started them in this container they'd be flowering and like this tall before you move them outside so don't start big stuff yet um small upright flowers do awesome but uh that's just kind of a rough idea again just scratching the surface of all the things that you could be starting right now in March it is a good time to start thinking about it you don't want to wait and then regret not starting stuff later you definitely want to get an idea right now because it's early March and so you still have all of March to kind of think about this where you're still going to have time but you want to start some stuff because if you don't Springs right around the corner spring is right around the corner like I can hear it it's knocking on the door and I've got spring fever I hope you guys do as well so get your garden started and hopefully you guys enjoyed if you did make sure to a like button subscribe if you haven't already and uh also if you're interested in any of these seed starting equipments uh or seed starting trays seeds labels anything like that we carry everything everything over at my gardner.com give us a check out we got super affordable pricing all stuff is uh is packed fulfilled by us we're you know small family company but we appreciate your support even your viewers so thank you guys so much and I'll catch you all on the next episode as always this is Luke from the Mi Garder Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 84,554

Keywords: vegetable gardening, organic gardening, garden, gardening, growing food, vegetables, vegetable garden, tomatoes, how to grow, simple, sustainable, urban gardening, raised bed, permaculture

Id: X0tm-T6_i-8

Length: 25min 35sec (1535 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2024