It's Time to Buy Seeds

Garden season starts now.

It’s January, which means it’s gardening time! No, really. It may not be time to plant yet, but it’s time to decide what to plant and buy your seeds. One of the tricks to gardening is staying a season ahead.

Photo by Joshua Lanzarini on Unsplash

I have six raised beds. One is growing garlic that should be ready to harvest around June, leaving me five beds. Here’s what I’m planning to grow in the early spring:

• Broccoli

• Cabbage

• Daikon Radish

• Lettuce

• Kale

These are all crops that do well in the cooler early spring weather. I’ll start the broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, and kale in February. Check our fall garden guide for more cool-weather crops.

Plan Your Fall Garden Now

If I didn’t already have them, I would also buy tomato and hot pepper seeds to start in early March. You can even start those in February depending on your weather. In May I’ll start replacing the cool-weather crops with hot-weather ones.

I prefer buying seeds online. Seed packets sold in stores are overpriced and have a tiny amount of seeds. I tend to buy many of mine from Johnny’s.

There are a lot of plant varieties and the options can be bewildering. If you know successful gardeners in your area, it’s worth asking their opinions on which ones work best. They may even have their own seeds they can sell you, bred over many seasons to be uniquely adapted to your area.

Check our seed-starting guide to learn how to get started growing seedlings.

Start Seeds for Your Victory Garden Now

I’m doing a couple of things different this year:

• I’ve fallen in love with Burpee’s SuperSeed trays. They’re silicone and reusable. You can simply pop out the seedling, and best of all, you can toss them in the dishwasher. They’re well worth the money, and they’re on sale right now.

• I bought a little cheap walk-in greenhouse for $50 at Tractor Supply last spring (like this one), and other than being hideous, it works great, so that’s where I’m starting all my seeds now. I keep it on the south side of my house, and I keep a thermometer in it so I can monitor the temperature. The temperature in the greenhouse tends to stay about 20 degrees higher than the outside.

This is also a good time to order perennial plants, like bushes, trees, and grape vines. Order them now while they’re in stock, and they’ll ship at the optimum time based on your growing zone. I like Ison’s for muscadine grapevines and Stark Bros. for bushes and trees.