Let’s talk early season planting and gardening in Pennsylvania
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: March 29th, 2023
It is officially spring. Flowers are starting to bloom, the grass is getting greener and leaves will be on the trees soon – here in central Pennsylvania.
Some places have already look like full blown spring. Have you seen pictures of the cherry blossoms in Washington D.C?
But for us – it’s early season and for the first time in four years – since the before the COVID pandemic, we were joined on The Spark Wednesday program by Erica Jo Shaffer – flower, plant and weed guru – to talk about early spring gardening.
What should those looking to plant be doing this early in the season? “One of the things you can do that’s helpful is to actually walk around your garden and try to figure out what you want to do this year. Plan. And not even like how many tomatoes you want to grow or like, is it time to start lettuce? Yes, it is a lot of seeds and be a little more aware when you go to the garden centers and know what it is that you want. Because the garden geek people — like we go and we think we know what we want, but then we go home with three times much more than we thought we were going to buy. So it’s helpful to know what it is you’re trying to achieve.”
Shaffer talked about cold crops that can be planted now,”Right now you can plant lettuce seeds, beet seeds, carrot seeds. You’re a little bit late on onion seeds, so you’d want to go to plants. But if you can find onion plants or the little bulbs, it’s definitely time for them. You would find packs of broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, kale. You may find lettuce plants already. So, you definitely can start because these are all the plants that want colder weather. So when summertime comes, they usually collapse.”
Shaffer said there are some plants that if the seeds haven’t already be planted, will have to wait to acquire plants,”You’re late for tomatoes. You’re late for peppers. You wanted to start those at, like, the beginning of March. The end of February. So if you started tomato seedlings, they should probably already be two or three inches tall. And then as far as other seeds are a little bit early because we don’t know what the weather’s going to do. I remember last year we had a frost at the end of May, so starting your cucumbers, squashes, zucchinis, anything like that right now you might have to hold them in the house longer and then they get all stretchy and start growing into each other. So I would say on those ones you’re going to actually want to wait about another two or three weeks.”
Erica Jo Shaffer will appear on The Spark throughout the year.
