Ramping up to garden

By Rennie Phillips

It seems like it is really early to start thinking about gardening in 2017, but not really. It's about the middle of December, so gardening season is just around the corner. It seems like every week now for several weeks we have been getting gardening catalogs. Some I will keep and use, while others we toss when they show up. I'm not sure how some of them even got our address. The ones we keep I go through and check certain veggies like tomatoes or cucumbers or kohlrabi. Sometimes I just leaf through them to just look. I received Morgan County Seeds, which is one of my favorite garden seed catalogs. This is one I normally order from every year. Another favorite is Johnny's Seeds.

The only thing I have started in my work room so far is onion seed. I planted some Evergreen Bunching onion seed, Ovation onion seed, Sweet Spanish onion seed and some Texas 1015 onion seed. I planted all my seed in small containers that measure about 3x3 and 4x4 inches. I put them under 4-foot fluorescent lights. My goal is to keep the temperature somewhere around 60 degrees in my work room, but that will be kind of difficult. I heat my work room with wood, so the temperature will run from about 40 up to at least 85 when the old wood stove is cranking on. Most plants are forgiving, so we should be OK.

I am wanting to plant some tomatoes in our outside garden, so I've been checking which ones sound the best. So far I've come up with four that sound good, but I'm still looking. I'll need to get the seed ordered by the first part of January. I know I have some Celebrity tomato seed, which is a great determinate.

The frost-free date here in Scott City is around April 15, give or take a week or so. It takes tomatoes about nine weeks from planting the seed till they are ready to plant in the garden, so I need to plant my outside garden seed around Feb. 1 to 15. This probably is a little early for many gardeners unless you really baby them and have either a greenhouse or a hot bed. If the weather in April is cold, I can leave them in our greenhouse for an extra week or two.

What I want to plant in our outside garden is determinate tomatoes. Determinate tomatoes only grow about 4 feet tall, so I can use wooden stakes or even short cages on the tomatoes. One thing about determinate tomatoes is they produce all their tomatoes in a month- to two-month period. They have a short but active lifespan, so it works real well to stagger the plantings.

I begin planting the indeterminate tomatoes for my high tunnels about Jan. 15. This will get the tomato plants ready to transplant by April 1. Because these tomato plants are going in the high tunnels, they should be OK unless we have a really cold spell around April 1.

I may plant about 50 tomato plants Jan. 1 to transplant into Wall O' Waters around March 7 or so. Wall O' Waters are a great way to plant a few early tomatoes. These Wall O' Waters surround the tomato plant with water, which will keep the tomato plant from freezing if the temperature gets too cold. Google them and check them out. One can plant at least six weeks earlier than normal using these Wall O' Waters. I buy mine from Morgan County Seeds where they are called Season Extenders.

One other plant that requires a good 10 to 12 weeks from planting seed to ready to transplant is peppers. Peppers will not take even a light frost, so a good planting date is April 15 to May 1. So we need to plant our pepper seeds around Feb. 1 to 15. This should give us some nice pepper plants to transplant at the end of April.

I was visiting with Dr. Tom this past week, and he said one of his favorite peppers was habaneros. So I'll need to get some habanero seed and see if I can start some hot pepper plants just for Dr. Tom. Our dog Dutchess likes peppers, so I don't want habaneros growing in our garden. I usually grow some jalapeño plants but normally we make jelly out of them. I like a good yellow or orange sweet bell pepper. I made some hot ice box pickles using jalapeños last summer and they make me sweat. They're almost too hot.

Several garden catalogs that I like are Baker Creek Heirloom catalog, Johnny's Seeds, Morgan County Seeds and Territorial Seeds. All of these are free, so just pull them up on the internet and sign up to get the catalogs. Mick likes Seed Saver's Exchange and Sandhill's Preservation. We have some super local businesses that carry seeds as well. Diebold's down by Benton has seeds. Sunnyhill Garden Center has a lot of seeds. Whitaker Hardware in Chaffee has a good supply of seeds. Most of the big-box stores carry seeds as well. And there are others that I'm not aware of.

Have a fun time planning next summers garden.

Until next time.