You could start seeds of any cool season crop that you intend to transplant into the garden in March--broccoli, spinach, lettuce, collards, mustard and other greens, cauliflower, peas, cabbage, etc. It generally is not recommended to start carrots, radishes, beets, rutabagas, parsnips, salsify and turnips indoor from seed though.

You could start seeds of very slow-growing warm-season plants like peppers and eggplant (they both grow a little more slowly than tomatoes, to which they are related), assuming you don't mind keeping them inside until very late April or early May when the soil and air temperatures are finally warm enough for them. It is still way too early to start the seeds of any other warm-season crops except tomatoes. With tomatoes, it depends on what part of Oklahoma you're in and what your last frost date is.

If you are in the southern third to southern half of OK, it is not too early to start tomato seeds now for transplants to be set out around the date of the average last freeze or frost. You can even set out your tomatoes "early"--maybe a couple of weeks before your last freeze or last frost date (they are not the same date) if you can cover them up at night to keep them warm.

When "planting fever" strikes, I purchase and plant a few very early tomato plants in pots that I can carry inside at night. Carrying those plants in at night and out every morning can get old, but it gives me early tomatoes to eat in April and lets me start "gardening" unreasonably and unseasonably early. It also keeps me from getting carried away with starting many things too early, because I know I'll run out of light shelf space (my light shelf holds 20 flats) and I don't want to have to carry huge amounts of plants in and out daily until the weather is warm enough.

You also can start the seeds of quite a few herbs now, and even cool-season flowers like johnny-jump-ups or petunias. I usually start petunias inside in Feb. and transplant them outside in late Mar. to mid-April depending on what the weather is doing.

It is still way too early to start seeds of fast-growing warm-season crops like cantaloupes and muskmelons, okra, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, winter squash, watermelons, etc. They all grow so quickly that you generally only want to start them from seed 4-5 weeks before their planting date at the absolute earliest and even 3-4 weeks is plenty of time to get sizable transplants. Generally, beans and corn are not grown from transplants although you can do it if you want and if you have the space, but you'd only want to start them from seed about 2 to 2.5 weeks before their transplanting date because they grow very, very quickly.

Hope this info helps.

Dawn

I'm trying to start some broadleaf sage from seed. I put 20 seeds on a napkin in a little dish, folded the napkin so the seeds were between layers of napkin, wetted the napkin then put the whole thing in an old plastic bread bag. I take the dish out every day so it keeps the air from getting stale and I can check and see if the seeds need more water (not too likely) or if they are sprouting.

Does that make sense?

Hank

PS - I bought my onion sets and plants and potatoes last week.

OR you could try wintersowing.

I have not started any veggies yet except broccoli and I have it outside. I will slide it inside on freezing nights for awhile tho. It is now about an inch tall. I will be starting tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant soon. I tend to start so early that they are very big before I can put them in the ground. Some years I plant in the ground to early then run around in the cold to cover and put bottles of hot water under the blanket, or buckets over the toms.....you know the drill. (Oh, the quest for that early tomato is strong.)

To help me control the urge of planting too early, I am keeping myself busy by winter sowing. I participated in several seed swaps this year so I have a lot of things to try. First I sent for free seed offers.....then I traded...then I ordered.....then I found a seed sale. You probably know that drill too. Our own Oklahoma "seedmama" has been schooling me and contributing to this new addiction. So far I have only planted perreniels, but I am starting on hardy annuals this week. At this point I have a number of things sprouting.

If you have some extra seeds around and a milk jug or clear pop bottle, it might be worth a try. I only buy milk in gallon jugs when my son comes, so that one was out for me. With all of the allergies in our family, not many of us are big milk drinkers.

Even if you don't plant, you can entertain yourself on the website. The biggest problem that I see is that you will have to be careful not to plant the tender plants too early. I will be using the same method for some later things, but I will not be planting them now. Of course, there are still those veggies that I will start under lights.

Have fun. http://www.wintersown.org/

Hank,

Sage seed is notorious for storing poorly and for germinating slowly. If your seed is going to germinate, it ought to germinate about 3 weeks after it is "planted". As long as the paper towel is damp, the seed ought to sprout. Putting it somewhere a little warm--like on top of the refrigerator might speed up germination a little too.

You might try wintersowing it as Carol suggests because some people feel like exposure to cold weather helps induce germination, although I don't think cold scarification is absolutely required for sage.

Or, you can direct sow it in your garden soil very early--probably mid-March in OKC. It won't germinate until early April at the earliest, but most of your coldest weather should be overwith by then anyway.

You do know that culinary sage from seed is very, very small and very, very slow to grow, don't you? In general, it takes a year and a half to get sage plants from seed to plants that are large enough from which to harvest leaves.

And, I think its great you have your onions and potatoes. I hope to plant mine next week. I was aiming for this weekend but the sleet and light rain changed my mind.

Dawn

I'll be starting tomatoes and peppers on the heated bench on the glassed porch this week (tomorrow I think) and next weekend will start the sugarsnap peas in peat pots on the bench. It only takes two weeks for the sugarsnaps from sowing to planting out. Then the first of March I will start the broccoli to have ready midApril. Broccoli, though a cole crop cannot take as much cold as cabbage, but will "button off"--make small heads too early.

Right now I have flats of spinach, radishes, lettuce and mesclun with some arugula. I planted those to have a few snippets to throw in salads, but may plant some of them out in a couple weeks or three

I'm not the only antsy one! :-) I started seeds 2 weeks ago tomorrow. My broccoli just graduated from the seed starter to our big front bay window, and will go into the garden in 3 weeks (I live NE of Tulsa, smack in the middle of zone 6B). Lettuces will probably be transplanted from the starter tomorrow. My tomatoes and peppers are just barely starting to poke their heads up, as well as the celery. once the tomatoes and peppers are transplanted and the cool crops are out in the garden I'll start the rest of the warm season things that need an indoor start. This is all going surprisingly (suspiciously?) well!

OKLibrarian,

I know that you are going to plant your broccoli early so you can try to get a crop before the warm season crops have to replace it in the same bed, but it seems to me like you might be planning on planting it a little too early.

I am as far south as you can go in Oklahoma and still actually be in Oklahoma and not in Texas, and I don't even put my broccoli in the ground until the first or second week of March, depending on where the low temperatures are at that point in time. If you plant your broccoli too early, it will not necessarily die....the plant itself can handle cold weather without freezing.

However, as Dorothy has already mentioned, broccoli that is exposed to cold temperatures at a certain point in its growth cycle will button, which means it will give you "heads" the size of a quarter, more or less....and sometimes even less than that.

The key fact to understand is that broccoli cannot be exposed to temperatures 40 degrees or below for two weeks while the plant is approximatey 4" to 6" tall. If your plants receive that kind of prolonged exposure at that stage of growth, they are forced into dormancy, When the temperatures warm up and they resume active growth, they often produce small heads prematurely and flower prematurely. So, the earliest you can safely plant your broccoli is about 2 weeks before your last freeze date and, even that is not a guaranteed "safe" date--because 50% of the time your last freeze date will occur "after" the average last freeze date. Last year, my last freeze occurred 5 or 6 weeks after my average last freeze date, so you can use average freeze dates as a guide but you have to remember that the weather does what it will do with no regard for "averages" and "calendars".

My average last freeze date here in southern OK is in late March, and I feel fairly safe planting broccoli in early (but not earliest!) March to mid-March but, if I were in the Tulsa area, for example, I wouldn't plant broccoli until latest March or early to mid-April.

It is your garden and you can plant whenever you want to, but planting too early can cause your crops to give you little to no yield, and it can be discouraging to spend a couple of months growing broccoli and then have almost nothing to show for it.

I like to plant early and push the limits, and I do it all the time, but you have to know which plants can tolerate early planting (with protection) and which ones can't. You can plant early successfully with some crops if you protect them from late freezes.....but with other crops, planting early backfires....broccoli is one of those crops, and so are peppers, okra, black-eyed peas, sweet potatoes, cucumbers and melons. In the case of those crops, early planting and exposure to more cold than they can handle greatly reduces yield even though the plants may not show any outward sign of being "bothered" by the cold weather.

The local stores here in zone 7B have had broccoli transplants in stock for about 3 weeks now, which means that people with severe gardening fever (and this is most common with newer gardeners who have not yet experienced the frustration of buttoned broccoli) could have purchased and planted broccoli plants in late January, a full 6 to 7 weeks before our average last freeze date. If they had done that (and some probably did), there is no way they will get a good crop from those plants. We've had a lot of temps in the 20s since then, and we've had hail and, as recently as yesterday, sleet. So, just because you "can" plant early doesn't mean that you "should".

Just some food for thought. And, on the attached link, you can click on the menu at the left and see all kinds of freeze data. And, sometimes, freeze data doesn't mean much. We have been here in OK ten years now, and we have had a freeze or frost later than our "average last freeze date" in 9 of those 10 years. That sounds wrong, because statistically we ought to have had our last freeze before that average date half the time and after that date half the time, but we live in the real world and the real world does not operate according to statistics, so the freeze has been after that date 90% of the time.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: OCS Average Last Freeze Dates

As usual, Dawn has explained the broccoli requirements very well. I tried for a few years to raise broccoli from purchased plants with little success. Now raising my own plants, I routinely harvest heads 8-10-12 inches across. Had to do some research. I plant at the average last frost for me which is mid April. Maybe could plant a little earlier but the plant bench is full of sugarsnaps until the first of March so that's when I sow broccoli. Then I plan on having the plants out of the garden by the first to midJune so I don't mess with the secondary sprouts after that. They get too strong, the worms get started, I don't want to water so the plants go to the chickens. They love 'em. And the worms.

Dorothy, Broccoli is one of those crops that gives gardeners fits in this climate, so I just tried to be thorough and explain how cold weather impacts it. Thanks for backing me up with your experience and the details of when you plant. Sometimes I feel like a big "meanie" when I am trying to talk someone out of planting too early, but it is always for (as you know) a valid reason. When I was younger and learning to garden, my grandmother and aunts and uncles would never tell me "not" to plant too early, but they'd always say either "I wouldn't do it" or "Oh, honey, no!" with a sad shake of their head. They're almost all gone now and I miss having their wise counsel as well as their sweet and gentle southern phrasing and expressions.

It is sort of ironic--I can plant tomato plants incredibly early (I have 4 in pots now, but they are coming inside every night) if I use WOWs or low tunnels (would love a high tunnel one of these days, if I can figure out how to keep the wind from carrying it away), and the tomatoes will produce well as long as I can keep the soil and air around them warm inside their "protective" barrier. With broccoli, though, it isn't even worth taking that chance.

Early plantings of any cool-season crop are hard for me anyway because the voles, field mice and bunnies can get through or under the fence and get them despite my best efforts to keep the wild things outside the garden. So, for me, it pays to plant cool-season crops late enough that enough winter weeds have sprouted to keep the little varmints fed so they'll leave March-planted broccoli (and carrots and greens) alone.

The one (and only) thing I miss about living in town in Fort Worth as I did for most of my life is that there were almost no critters messing with the garden in town. Here, every critter in southern OK, wild or domesticated, tries to get in the garden and eat what I plant. (I even have a Rottweiler-terrier mixed breed dog named Duke who picks and eats tomatoes, but he's so cute when he does it that I can't get mad at him because I'm rolling on the ground laughing.) Well, and I miss gardening in zone 8 where I COULD plant broccoli in Feb. of most years.

And did you have to mention the dreaded broccoli worms? (sigh) I get depressed just thinking about them. Actually, I haven't had many lately. I think my reward for feeding the wild birds all winter (I feed them right outside the veggie garden fence) is that they stick around and eat a lot of insect pests for me the rest of the year.

I am so ready to plant something in the ground--onions this week and hopefully potatoes as well, although the potatoes could "slide" into next week. However, after having rainfall on 3 days last week (Hallelujah!), my garden is still a little muddy (but the big cracks in the unimproved soil are still as big as ever).

I think Tues. and Wed.'s high winds will dry out the raised beds enough that I can plant onions, though.

I hope all is going well in your garden planning and seed starting.

Dawn

Sorry about the delayed response--been busy with other projects! I have the day off on March 9th, which is when I was tentatively planning to plant all my cool weather stuff outside (if I run out of room for warm things in the bed, then I buy more containers and learn my lesson for next year). IIRC that was the day before the end of the OSU cool season window which is what I had been going by--do I need to push back even further than that?

OKLibrarian,

Well, if you look at the OSU Garden Planning Guide, which I've linked below, you will see that the planting window for early cool-season crops is generally Feb. 15h-March 10th, so you'd be correct in thinking those crops should be in by March 10th or shortly thereafter. You can ALWAYS delay a week or two or even three if truly cold weather is in the forecast--better to plant "late" than to plant and have everything freeze. If your plants freeze and die, or if they are exposed to enough cold to cause them to button, then your harvest will be pretty much nothing.

Broccoli, though, is not really an early cool-season crop. It is really more of a bridge crop that goes in later than most cool-season crops like onions, potatoes, radishes, lettuce and other greens, beets, etc., but earlier than warm-season crops like tomatoes, sweet corn, and beans.

OSU shows the entire month of March as the planting window for broccoli, so I interpret that to mean that I should plant broccoli here in extreme southern OK in early March, but not necessarily earliest March which still tends to have some really cold nights, so I'm aiming for about the second week of March, but I am not distressed if cold weather makes me delay until March 15th-20th or so. If I lived in OKC, I probabaly wouldn't even think about planting broccoli until March 20-25th or so, and if I lived anywhere north of OKC, I'd be inclined to aim for the very end of March, perhaps the 28th-31st, and wouldn't be distressed if I didn't plant until early April.

Go back and read what Dorothy said about planting her broccoli. She is in Adair County and has significantly colder nights than I do here in southern OK in March and April. She's a very experienced gardener, and you won't see her planting anything too early because she's learned from many years of experience that is doesn't pay to jump the gun. I don't remember where you are in OK, but unless you're within a couple of counties of the Red River in southern OK, then Dorothy's planting date is closer to the right date for you than mine would be.

If you absolutely, positively must plant early, then your best chance of success is to plant under a low tunnel (picture a hoophouse that is only tall enough for the plants, and not tall enough for you) using one of the Agribon row covers that gives your plants some protection from cold nights. Will that be enough by itself? Probably not, unless we have the warmest March of the decade. You might up your odds with a soil heating cable (you bury it in the soil to heat it up) or with milk jugs or two-liter soda bottles filled with water. The water absorbs sunlight and heat during the day and releases it at night. With luck, the released heat might keep your plants warm enough, but there are no guarantees.

I can guarantee you that if you are in the northern half of OK, planting in early March will given you "button" broccoli 9 years out of 10, and possibly 9.5 years out of 10, were such a thing possible.

It is incredibly rare for March weather to stay above the 40s night after night after night. It just isn't going to happen.

If your plants are already growing and getting big and tall indoors, you can slow them down a couple of ways. Give them only minimal water--enough to keep them alive, but but not enough to make them grow rapidly. Don't give them any fertilizer at all. Keep them in a cool but not cold location--50 to 60 degrees will slow them down a bit as opposed to 60-80 degrees. If you have them under lights, cut them from 16 hours of light a day to 8 to 12. It seems cruel, but if you can slow them down without completely stopping their growth, they'll be "happier" inside for a longer period of time. And, then, perhaps you won't feel as pressured to get them into the ground early.

We certainly aren't trying to discourage you but simply have learned from many years (or, for a few of us, decades) of growing that planting broccoli early rarely if ever pays off.

For what it is worth, you'll get a second chance with broccoli if you have the garden space for it. You can plant a fall crop in late summer for harvest in late autumn.

Dawn

I hate forgetting to link something that I said I'd link. (sigh)

So, here it is.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: OSU Garden Planning Guide

Betty, when your tomato plants get leggy, add more soil until you are almost to the leaves.

I plant my tomato seed, about half an inch to one inch apart, in the bottom half of a milk bottle and set the cut off top back on to keep the soil moist just until the seedlings begin to pop up. When they have their first set of true leaves, I carefully transplant them into individual pots (I use 12-oz foam drinking cups that are about half full with soil). Even with getting them as close to the light as you can, they will get a little 'leggy'. That's when I add more soil around the plant, all the way up to the leaves. This makes for a better root.

Last year I planted tomatoes the last week of January. That was 'way too early since they sprouted the very next day, thanks to a heat mat I had under them. I had to transplant them several times, until they were in a 32-oz foam cup, and by the time it was warm enough to set them out they were huge. I set some of them out a little too early, got a late frost and the ones I planted vertically were nipped back to the ground. The ones I planted horizontally were killed. So, for all my efforts, I didn't get tomatoes any sooner and then it rained so much my plants got a disease -- or several -- and I had to pull all of them up. I did get some nice tomatoes for a little bit, though, which allowed us to get our hunger for tomatoes satisfied and gave me a few to can. A few plants came up volunteer from tomatoes that rotted that I threw down on the ground and I let them stay. They were looking great and just beginning to bear when the first frost hit in late October, so those little tomatoes, about golf ball size, were sliced and fried green.

This year I won't be transplanting tomatoes into the garden until after April 15. My zone is 6a/6b. The Farmer's Almanac planting dates are 'way off according to my experience. I use the planting dates given for Independence, KS. I'm going to put my cabbage, onions and maybe the potatoes into the ground about the middle of March.

Here is a link that might be useful: Farmer's Almanac - use box to indicate your area

Oklibrarian, If you have the room you may want to plant another batch of broccoli to plant out no earlier than 2 weeks before your frost free date. It only takes 6 weeks for me from starting the seeds--over a heat cable--to putting into the garden.

You can start late and still get a decent crop. Remember that 18 degree freeze in Early April of 07? That took out most of my broccoli, peas, lettuce and beets. I had to start over with all of them, the broccoli and peas on the heated bench and the lettuce and beets in the garden. I got a crop that definitely made the effort worth it, but not as good as I would have.

And those dratted broccoli worms. We allow redwasps and dirtdaubers to build in the garden shed next to the garden and they both pack a lot of paralyzed broc worms into their nests. Of course we warn the grandaughters to stay away from the shed during the summer and we get rid of wasp nests around the house and yard where they play. And I never serve broccoli to guests at my house. My family knows that worms are just a fact of life and you pick the things off if one makes it through the processing into the freezer, but I take the delicate sensibilities of others into account and just don't serve broccoli.