When to Plant?

Typical daily salad for January

Here in our area we are lucky enough to be able to grow many things even in the winter. By choosing our vegetable varieties carefully and giving them some protection if needed we can harvest fresh produce all year round.

This is a picture of what my January salads have looked like. Five to ten varieties of baby lettuce, Giant Red Mustard, spinach, sorrel, chickweed, viola and violet blossoms, violet leaves, spinach, Easter Egg Radishes. The only thing not typical are those little Yellow Marble Tomatoes.

The Yellow Marble Tomatoes were volunteers in a pot last summer, about three of them along with one plant of an Italian drying tomato, Princepe Borghese. When the first frost threatened I moved the pot into my greenhouse. This is just a frame of PVC pipe covered with plastic on the south side of my house. Generally it is only one or two degrees warmer in there at night than it is outside. Some how, some way this one Yellow Marble plant has managed to survive all winter and ripen all it's little green tomatoes. It's looking pretty sad right now though and if we have some more deep freezes I doubt it will make it.

Most of the lettuce and salad greens are growing outdoors. Some of them are under a frost blanket or row cover. These are thin white spun bonded polyester covers that can protect plants from 6-12 degrees of frost. But one lettuce bed is in the open and not covered. It has done much better than I thought it would through the frost and snow, though it does grow slower than the lettuce that is covered.

Violet and viola blossoms, along with pansies are edible. The big purple pansies that I have are pretty blah tasting, but the viola blossoms are very tasty, with a sweet flower taste. The violets taste much like they smell, only fainter. All of these plants have edible leaves, the violet leaves are a little tougher than the violas. They taste sort of 'green'.

The violas and most of the lettuces were planted in August, September and November. The violets are of course the old fashioned kinds and are perennials.

It is important to plant your seeds early enough in the fall so that your plants are big enough to survive and harvest throughout the winter. The Arizona Master Gardeners program has put their handbook online . In it is a planting chart for Arizona, organized by elevation. As far as I can tell it is only for when you should plant things out in the open without protection. There are a few things I disagree with and I often plant as much as a month (or more) earlier if I am starting seeds indoors or planting out under row covers, but it is a good place to start if you are new to gardening in this area.

Another good resource for year round gardening is Elliot Coleman's Four Season Harvest. I learned a lot of great new ideas from reading this and Elliot's other gardening books.