Soak seeds of beets, Swiss chard, and peas for fifteen or twenty minutes before planting. Soak parsley, New Zealand spinach, and celery seed overnight to hasten germination.
Make multiple plantings of lettuce. “I make nine plantings of lettuce each season,” says a Vermont gardener. “Sometimes I scrape snow away to plant the first batch.” He plants only a couple of feet of each variety at a time. “I don’t try to salvage overmature lettuce,” he declares. “I turn it under and plant some more.”
Looseleaf lettuces are quicker and easier to grow than heading types. Plant Romaine for a crunchy, meatier leaf that does quite well in hot weather.
Start seed of buttercrunch lettuce in beds. Transplant seedlings eight inches apart to all the empty spaces in the garden — next to the peas, between rows of onions, or between young brassicas.
Plant early lettuce between asparagus rows.
Having trouble starting lettuce in hot weather? Since it germinates best in cool ground, Ruth Stout chills the seed in the refrigerator, plants it, then lays blocks of ice over it, and insulates from the sun with feed bags. Try this with late plantings of spinach or peas, too.
Does spinach bolt too soon in your garden? Try New Zealand spinach, which does better in warm weather, or grow Malabar spinach on a fence or trellis.
Leaf crops — lettuce, spinach, chard, mustard greens, and parsley — do well in partially shaded locations.
Always inoculate your legume seed before planting. You can buy legume inoculant, which looks like black powder, through seed catalogs or from feed stores. It adds a fresh culture of nitrogen-fixing bacteria to the seed, which will increase yield and quality of peas and beans. Moisten seeds and shake with the powder just before planting. A touch of honey on the seeds makes the powder stick better. Keep unused inoculant in the refrigerator until you need it again. There is also a granular type that is sprinkled in furrows as you sow.
For earliest peas, prepare the planting trench in fall. In spring, just push seed into the soil.
Mark Hebert of Garden Way, Inc., isn’t a lazy gardener. He loves it out there in his large and beautiful garden. But let’s say that Mark doesn’t believe in doing things the hard way. And when it comes to raising peas, Mark has an easy way: “Early in the season, till up a ten-foot square of your garden. Scatter on it one pound of a shorter-bushed pea, such as Little Marvel. Till or rake in the peas, then walk over the soil. And that’s it until two months later when you return to harvest them — and you should harvest fifty pounds of pods from that tiny space. No need for fences or other supports — the peas will support each other. “Try this just once, and you’ll never go back to the single-row system, trying to get each pea just three inches apart from its neighbor.
For the vegetable that requires the least effort to grow, we’ll nominate the Jerusalem artichoke. Plant a few tubers in a bed in one corner of your garden. And that’s it. They need little or no care — the greatest effort probably goes into keeping them from taking over your entire garden. They’ll easily discourage the advances of the hungriest insects. Dig them up in the fall or early spring. You’ll miss a few — and they’ll grow to provide your crop for the next season. They’re delicious and nutritious, fresh or cooked.
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