Square Foot Gardening Tips: February

Patti Moreno: Hi! I’m Patti Moreno the garden girl. Mel Bartholomew: And I’m Mel Bartholomew with the Square Foot Gardening Foundation. Patti Moreno: Yes month’s tip is all about seeds. Mel Bartholomew: Yes. Patti Moreno: February is a time where I start a lot of my seeds indoors so that I can put them out in my garden. Mel Bartholomew: Absolutely. Patti Moreno: Well, I love to starting my own seeds because it’s so much more cost effective. Mel Bartholomew: Absolutely, we are talking about pennies instead of dollars. Patti Moreno: Exactly. Mel Bartholomew: Plus it’s a great thing for the kids. They love to see plant seeds and then see them sprout. There’s something magic about a seed sprouting. Here’s a packet of cabbage seeds. And cabbage is a cool weather crop. It can go out in the spring time, a couple of weeks before your last frost state. Patti Moreno: Yeah. Talk a little bit about our frost state and why we are starting indoors to begin with. Mel Bartholomew: Good. First of all you have to find out your last frost state for spring time. Now, you can do that by zip code. And the government has taken and compiled all these numbers of when the last frost state was for all the different areas of the country. Patti Moreno: And that varies from region to region. Mel Bartholomew: Yes and also varies from year to year because every year is not the same, but they have taken the average. So keep that in mind. Patti Moreno: Absolutely. Mel Bartholomew: Now, there’s a lot of seeds in here. Pati Moreno: Right, yeah. Mel Bartholomew: Here’s how you decide how many to plant. Patti Moreno: Okay. Mel Bartholomew: How many heads of this kind of cabbage would you want in your garden. And don’t say, “Oh, I like a lot of cabbage. I’ll put in 20.” Patti Moreno: Right. Mel Bartholomew: Because you’re not going to eat 20 heads of cabbage. You might grow some other kinds too or different colors. So, you’d say, “Well, on this particular variety I’d like two or three or four the most.” And if you want four heads of cabbage, then I would plant eight seeds. Patti Moreno: Right. And why do we want to plant double the amount of seeds? Mel Bartholomew: Just because it satisfies our inner urge, let’s say what if they don’t grow, everyone says, “Yeah but what if” they’re all saying. And you get the kids to help you now by looking at the seeds. Pour them out on a white piece of paper. Let them take either a pencil or a stick and move them about, don’t touch them with your hands yet because you have oil all over your hands. We’re going to plant just one cabbage plant in one square foot. And if you want two cabbages, two square feet, if you want four, four square feet. We are not going to crowd them. They have all the room they want to grow. Patti Moreno: Okay. Mel Bartholomew: So first, you have to decide maybe with your family and get the kids and say, “Kids, how many of this variety, here’s a picture of it from the seed catalog, would you like to have in our garden?” Patti Moreno: Right. Mel Bartholomew: And of course they’ll say, “a hundred or one or I don’t want cabbage” something like that. Now, what do you do with the rest of the seeds? Patti Moreno: You’ve got to store them for you to use. Mel Bartholomew: Yeah. Okay. And if you don’t store them under the right conditions, in the correct conditions, they might go bad in a year or two. But if you store them in the correct conditions, they will last for many years. Actually, they will probably last until three, five, 10 years, imagine that. Now, what are the right conditions? Patti Moreno: I was just going to say. What are the right conditions? What do we need to do? Mel Bartholomew: Okay. Well, I find an easy way to remember as you do the opposite is when you want to sprout them. Patti Moreno: Got you, so when we want to sprout them. Mel Bartholomew: There is two things you need. Patti Moreno: Right. Mel Bartholomew: First is moisture. So, you want these in a dry place. Next is warmth. The warmer it is, the faster the seeds will sprout. So, you want them in a cool place. Not freezing but cool. And the best thing to do is to put them in a jar like this or a zip lock bag. Put them in the refrigerator. Not the freezer because they will get freezer burned in there. So, put them in the refrigerator, maybe in the back shelf. And you could pull this out every time you want to plant. This cool weather crop we’re going to plant again in the fall. So, tune in next summer and we’ll tell you when to start this seeds for your fall crop. Patti Moreno: Well, this has been wonderful. I’m so excited to start sprouting my seeds with my family. I’m Patti Moreno, the garden girl. Mel Bartholomew: And I’m Mel Bartholomew, I should say the garden guy, right. Patti Moreno: See you next month.