We're Back with a Winter Update!

Like that zombie plant that you thought for sure was absolutely dead until it miraculously sprung to life, Leafing Out is back! Gabe and Rebecca announce a new May to October season and give some advice on how to prepare for Spring.

Find your last frost date: https://garden.org/apps/frost-dates/

Some fave seed suppliers:
https://fedcoseeds.com/
https://www.highmowingseeds.com/
https://www.prairiemoon.com/
https://www.johnnyseeds.com/
https://ptlawnseed.com/

Reddit's Native Plant Gardening board has a source list for native seeds: https://old.reddit.com/r/NativePlantGardening/wiki/index

Please don't use Round-Up or other weed killers: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/us/roundup-cancer-verdict-philadelphia-bayer-monsanto/index.html

Email us or send us a voice memo at leafingoutpod@gmail.com

@Leafingoutpod on instagram for sick gardening memes

Leafing Out season 2 starts May 15th!

Transcript

0:05

Welcome to leafing out a podcast about gardening. I'm Gabe. And I'm Rebecca. And we are not gardening experts. We are basically amateur gardeners sharing what we learn and how we learn it and all of our the mistakes that we make on our gardening journey. So today we are bringing you a special late winter episode. We've gone away for so long and we're back. We have big news. We are very excited to announce that Leafing out is back and we are doing an official season of episodes this May through October. Talking about everything we're learning, experimenting with, messing up, figuring out in the garden throughout the spring, summer and fall. So we're excited to talk more in May. But meanwhile, let's dig into what's going on now in late winter, almost spring. So spring starts on Tuesday, March 19th. But that does not mean that that's when you plant all your plants in the ground or whatever. Please don't start gardening. Tuesday, March 19th. Don't plant your tomatoes on March 19th. Please don't do that. If you're doing that, you're probably not listening to this podcast. That's true. But that does segway into last frost, which is kind of the critical date to figure out when you should start gardening. And I think I'm going to get the number correct here. I believe that after your last Frosty, there is a 95% chance of no frost, something like that. So if you have plants that are very frost sensitive, you can plant them, you know, on your last frosty or maybe like a couple of days after tomatoes, peppers, that sort of thing. And you can pretty much be guaranteed that they won't be killed by frost. This is why a lot of people say, I don't plant anything until Mother's Day weekend, because Mother's Day is a little bit after our last frost date here in the northeast. Basically, like if you put a head of lettuce in your freezer and you took it out after 24 hours and it would be all kind of like melty and slushy and disgusting. That's what happens to all of your tender plants if you plant and then frost hits them. So let's not do that to ourselves. Let's not make that mistake, which I have made every year by the way. I always can't help myself. And I'm like, It'll be fine. It's so warm, it's so nice. And then we have a frost and everything looks like garbage. But do as I say, not as I do. And lots of stuff can go out early and plant, you know, your peas, whatever. But. Yeah. Tell us about things you can plant before your last frost. Yeah. I'm not that good at this. Obviously, this is kind of a tangent, but you would put your bulbs in the fall. Lights is an interesting one because a lot of greens you can plant out pretty early. I wouldn't plant them out, you know, now, but maybe end of March party, Asian greens, parsley. What about spinach? Don't plant spinach. Yes, spinach is made sweeter. Spinach and kale are made sweeter by a light frost. They will still be killed by you know, if you if you planted them in February or something and you got some hard frost, they would definitely die. But just a little dusting of frost. They do just fine with. So for now, here we are in early March. And one thing that I've been observing that's pretty fun this time of year is, you know, you look outside and everything still seems the same as it kind of did in January. For the most part, we have like a couple of snowdrops popping up and our witch Hazel Tree is blooming, which is always such a nice kind of like very early spring, but it's happening. Spring will come kind of sign. But you know, what I noticed today is our house plants a few of our house plants are putting up some new growth after being dormant, which, you know, they're house plants. They're not outside. They're not responding to the cold winter weather. But what they do react to is the amount of sunlight in the day, the number of hours of sunlight dictates to your house plants when to go dormant and then when to wake up. And they wake up for spring, just like everything outside does. And at this point in March, we have so much more sunlight than we did on December 21st at the winter solstice that the right deal for the winter solstice. my God, I'm so impressed that I just pulled that out. And much more intense light. Also, it's duration. Intensity. So the house plants are getting a little like green house vibe, and they're like, Yeah, I'm protected from the frost. Cool. But, like, look at all this sunshine we're having. I'm alive. I'm awake. So I was Googling Gabe what we should talk about on this episode. And I googled. What do gardeners do in winter? What real gardeners do? What do real cards? There's not. A lot of real do. Do in winter. The first thing that came up, which I kind of was planning on talking about planning winter is the time to plan. If you haven't been planning what you're going to do in the garden this spring, summer, do it now. Now's the time, because that's your insurance against getting impulsive and making some expensive mistakes at the nursery this spring. So you want to be looking at your garden and go back and look at pictures from last spring and summer and think like, what did I want to put in that one spot? Or like, that plant that I thought was going to be great in that spot that didn't work at all? Or what kind of like infrastructure projects did I want to take on, like setting up some in-ground kind of like watering systems or anything like that? Now's the time to make all of those kind of plans that you can then execute without getting all kind of disorganized when spring comes along. There's so much to do. I'm really good slash bad at going to the nursery and seeing all these little tiny plants and being like, they're so tiny, I'll just put them all in the garden next to each other completely. And so looking at that photo from August and being like, yeah, I actually need like one plant, not five plants for that spot is worth three or four, three. Of one plant, not one of seven different plants, one each of seven different types of plants. Think about where you might if you're building your garden, add three a group of three somewhere or a group of five, or expand a group of three. That worked really well until like a group of seven where you kind of can create this like drift of plants and start getting kind of painterly with the effect Now's a great time to do all that kind of plant planning. And then now is the time also to start looking at your nurseries and looking at what plant lists they have and figuring out where you're going to source those four more plants that you need or whatever it is. You know, what's another thing that we're doing as gardeners in winter that I didn't really think about this way until I looked at it. Composting. We've been composting all our stuff all winter. I mean, doing as good a job of it as we can most of the time. And it's just nice to think about that is like an act of gardening that you're doing in winter that you're going to make good use of pretty soon. And then the other thing we're doing in winter is starting right now, starting to order seeds. So maybe you can talk about ordering seeds and I guess we're going to talk about ordering seeds. You got to start with talking about like, what do we do with seeds? Are we starting our seeds indoors? Are we doing what's called direct sowing our seeds? It's so fun to look at websites and look at all the pictures of all the vegetables and flowers and everything. Order a million seed baguettes and our house is like littered with seed packets. But what's our plan with ordering seeds? Like what are we going to do? Well, the pendulum of my seed life has really swung back and forth. There definitely been winters when or spring's or summers when I have like no planning and I just kind of like grab a bunch of seeds at Home Depot and I'm like, thrown in the ground and that's not great. There have been other winters where I'm like, like I can't wait to get in the garden. I'm going to start my seeds in February. And like, that is also not great. So is the most boring advice ever. But it really does pay to just like read the instructions. So the question of direct sowing transplanting. What is direct sowing? Great question. So direct sowing is when you're just taking your seeds and you're planting them in the garden where you want them to grow, as opposed to starting your seeds indoors in a window or under a light grow light, then transplanting them later on. So there are a few things to think about. One, there are a bunch of plants that need a longer growing season than you might have in your zone. So for example, where we are in New England, tomatoes really need a longer growing season than what we have. So if you know, they they're very frost sensitive. If you took your tomato seeds planted them in the ground in May, you might get a small tomato crop in kind of mid September or something. But you really want to be starting those 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost date. So indoors. Indoors, you want to be starting those plants indoors. And the alternative is you just go and buy the plants. If you feel like a seed starting isn't something that you want to take on, definitely it's not a requirement at all. But just to kind of back up that point of like it really is kind of plant specific what you want to be doing. There are other plants where, you know, like, I don't know, peas, they don't transplant that well. They have a taproot, it's called where it's like a central. Like a carrot. Like a carrot. Exactly like a carrot. The carrot that you eat, that's a taproot. Yeah. So it's really hard to transplant something like a carrot without damaging that taproot. And if that taproot is damaged at all, like even just sort of overly jostled, the plant will grow. So carrots, you never really you don't go to the store and find carrot plants and you don't always want to direct seed, something like that. Right. So all of that stuff is going to be direct. So because you can't move it, you have to plant it where you want it to grow. You cannot move the little plant start. So like when you're looking at seeds, you need to really consider what kind of gardening you want to be doing and say, okay, do I want to start seeds indoors or do I only want to grow stuff that I can direct? So and if I do want to start stuff indoors, am I trying to start stuff indoors for just a couple of weeks and then, you know, get stuff going early? Like what kind of commitment am I taking on? What kind of spots in my house do I have? Like what am I willing to do here? Are these are the questions to ask before you order 30 different seed packets and then read the instructions on all of them and realize that you've signed up for like five different methods of seed starting seed gardening. And on that same time I of do as I say, not as they do. It's also important when you're seed starting to think not about how much space you need to start the seeds, but how much space you're going to need for that plant when it's just about to go outside. So again, returning to tomatoes, you know, you get some tray that's like six by six and it's like 36 little things. You're like, great, I'm going to do a whole bunch of tomatoes in here. Well, in two weeks, those tomatoes will be totally maxed out, route bound. You're going to need a bigger pot. You may not have room for 36 four inch pots in your windowsill or whatever. So I think how much vertical Hey, do you have also because we have this garden window that is so wonderful and I really like have always wanted to have one. I'm so excited about it. And so you've put all of our starts in that window and it was so cool and then it works so well as a little greenhouse that gets so much light. The plants started getting enormous, so tall that they were hitting the roof of the garden window really quickly. And we still had like three more weeks of frost outside before we could put them outside. And no other window has enough light to keep the plants going. So we were like, my God, what are we going to do? I'm going to jump ahead to where to buy seeds. That's a good idea to off. So a couple of my favorites are fed CO hi mowing Prairie Moon nursery and Johnny's. So I'll put all of this in the show notes. To put that in the show notes for sure. Kind of an obvious point, but shipping is not super cheap necessarily, so in on the topic of planning, it's helpful to kind of like make your list of plants, look at which place or places have those and try and, you know, do one order. Again, I have done the opposite and somehow found myself doing four different orders from the same darn seed place. And it's very frustrating. So let's get to the fun stuff. What are what are you ordering? What are we growing from? Seed Yeah, let me just let me make one other point about seeds just as an intro seeds do have a date on them, it'll be the date that they are sort of guaranteed. Good for where if they have a germination rate of 90% or something, it's kind of a company saying like, you know, you bought them in 2024, they're going to have a 90% germination. And that means like nine out of ten of the seeds in the packet are guaranteed to Germany. As time goes on. And this is somewhat plant specific, the germination rate will drop. But say you have like some big packet of arugula rouleau seeds will last for years. So just because a seed packet is from last year, depending on what that plant is, you know, if it's like some super fancy hybrid tomato and you got three seeds and you really want to make sure you have that plant, maybe you want to buy two new tomato seeds, but if you have left over seeds that you're just kind of like goes bunch of greens, like it's definitely worth throwing them in the garden. Or just like, do a quick Google of like a regular seeds. How long do they last? Yeah, yeah. You know, another good source for, for seeds. If you're interested in native gardening, which everybody should be interested, at least need a native gardening a little bit because this is native gardening is also like ecological gardening. Native plant gardening on Reddit has a source list for native seeds. They have like a wiki index for all of the best places to buy native plant seeds by location. Google like Reddit, native plant gardening. You can find their index of of seed sources if you just want the classic native red Columbine that is the one that's going to draw the hummingbirds to your yard, which is really cool. You might need to look for a place that sells native seeds. You were asking me about what we're starting from seed. yeah? Yeah. So we started. Let's meet us. So, yeah, we're always starting tomatoes. We're doing that. But we're starting our own tomatoes because we want to get those really good sungold tomatoes, plants that are so wonderful and hard to sometimes find. The plant starts, but you can get the seeds. So that's what we're doing. But it's a little tricky sometimes. Yeah, the seedlings. Yeah, they can be, I would say an intermediate, maybe. They're not like the one of all plants to start with if you're starting growing from seed. Yeah. I think if you're starting out, growing from seed, I would start with some kind of green, whether it's like a herb, you know, a parsley or cilantro or something like that, or lettuces, you get a Tennessee, the seed is tiny. It's really cheap for, you know, a packet will have like hundreds of seeds in it. You can just get yourself a pot, throw a bunch of seeds in there, put it in a window, you'll get a ton of little plant starts. They're pretty easy to separate, even if the roots are tangled and you kind of rip them, most of them will survive. And then the other thing that I'm starting to see this year is a bit of an experiment is grass, because we have been really bad at watering our lawn, which is a low water lawn, but we have pushed it past its breaking point. We didn't know and we fucked out. And we've had as the lawn has kind of died off, we have this weed called the couch grass, which some people plant is a lawn, but it's like a very sort of bright green. It looks a little bit like crabgrass. It looks a lot like crabgrass, like ryegrass. Some of us have argued over whether it's crabgrass or not. Yeah. Anyway, so I am kind of like reading out all the old stuff and pulling it out and doing grass plugs. And that leads me to my one of other favorite source for Seeds, which is pro time lawn Seed. They're in, I believe, Oregon or Washington State, but they have a really great selection of eco friendly lawn seeds. So they have like a dog park mix. So if you have a dog that you're letting out in your yard, you know they have something for that. If you want lots of blooms, you know, they have a mix. That is what we started with as like daisies and clover and stuff. All of them are water efficient, low mow for the most part. You don't have to be out there mowing all the time. You do need to water, though. You do have to water sometimes. Low water efficient does not mean you don't have to walk around for the first like two years. It was incredible Carpet of clover and little tiny white daisies. And our babies were like crawling around in the clover. And the daisy was so cute and wonderful and like, different than just a lawn that is just grass that you have to mow all the time and water like crazy and potentially use weed killer on which we should have a whole nother like special episode where we just talk shit about weed killer. This is like 32nd version. Everybody's seen not everybody, but it seems like the conversation around glyphosate is, you know, people know it's like really bad. What is the chemical and what do you actually mean? Yeah, sorry, Roundup. So glyphosate is the that's the active ingredient roundup really bad. Don't use it. Don't use that. But that is I think people have a certain awareness of that. But anything that's labeled like a weed in feed or like a lawn herbicide basically that is a broadleaf weed killer, so it will kill your grass. But anything that has like a a leaf clover or yarrow or anything also tied to all sorts of health problems. You don't want to use these things on areas where you're going to be like mowing the grass and then inhaling it. So we love these other alternatives for some like cooler lawn options that also are going to, if you water it, not make you feel like you need to use any of those weed killers. real quick. Also, I just wanted to shout out like what? What else to watch out for when you're shopping for seeds, you also probably might not want to get seeds for plants that are like perennials where you need to really grow that plant for a long time before it flowers or produces fruit or whatever fruit, meaning like tomatoes, for example. People are happy to sell you seeds for anything. And there are some seeds that you can buy. And then. Japanese. Blue. That's yes, I've seen those. The blue purple unicorn leaves Japanese maples. Yeah, that's not real. That's that's not real. But if you like, look in the fine print at some seeds it'll say like, this actually flowers in its second year and it grows like only this much the first year and you might not have the patience for that. You might want to just stick to the stuff that's really going to be rewarding to grow from seed that season it produces for you. It does what you were hoping. Can you think of any common examples? Lavender is a good example. Look, you know she of people growing lavender from seed wonderful. But for folks like us who have limited amount of space and time and energy in our day like buy a little lavender plant and by cilantro seeds. Not to belabor the point, but I would say that anything that falls into that even sub shrub category, which is how I would categorize lavender or something, that, you know, it's not a shrub like a rhododendron, but it is like a good sized woody perennial. Plants. Yeah. In less year, like really going hard. Get that as a plant. Yeah. Because that stuff grows a little slower. Grows you want. To grow slowly if. You want to enjoy it five years from now and have a cool science experiment, definitely do the seeds if you want to like, look great in your garden. Maybe not this year, but next year and be start starting to approach it for like two or three years now. Yeah. By the plant. Thank you so much for listening. If you have a question that you want answered on podcast, you can email us or send us a voice memo at leafing out pad at gmail.com. You can also just DM us on Instagram, which we're all better at these days, I think, than answering email, right? We're at leafing out Pod on Instagram. We really love hearing from you. Please chat with us. And it will also do us a huge favor. If you could read us and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Happy gardening. See you out there.