Gardening: Seed catalogs, websites can help growers plan ahead

As gardeners begin to think about the growing season, now is the perfect time to plan for the types of fruits and vegetables you wish to plant.
As gardeners begin to think about the growing season, now is the perfect time to plan for the types of fruits and vegetables you wish to plant.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Time to drool over colorful photos of mouth-watering vegetables and flowers in a variety of stunning colors in seed catalogs and on seed company websites.

It's time to order seeds for your vegetable or flower garden for this growing season. By now, your mailbox or email inbox has likely seen an influx of colorful seed catalogs and email messages with links to the latest and greatest varieties of vegetables, annual flowers and herbaceous perennial plants. But there's more to starting the garden than meets the eye.

Seed companies offer a wide variety of products for home gardeners.
Seed companies offer a wide variety of products for home gardeners.

Have a plan for your garden

Before you begin to order seeds, it is helpful to review the successes and challenges you experienced in the garden last season. Ideally, you have a garden journal or written notes with information about which varieties of peas your family liked best last spring or the name of the cultivar of those dwarf sunflowers that set your garden ablaze with color last August.

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If you don’t have written notes and you don’t trust your memory, look for order forms or packing slips from last year’s seed order when attempting to identify that most-loved cultivar.

Mike Hogan
Mike Hogan

When you think about your vegetable or flower garden from last season, identify objectives for what you hope to achieve in the garden this year. If you battled foliar or wilt diseases last year, look for cultivars with resistance to specific diseases. Although using disease-resistant cultivars won’t necessarily eliminate the incidence of plant diseases, it greatly reduces the potential for widespread damage from many disease organisms.

Easy Peasy is a new cultivar of peas from Burpee Seeds featuring large pods and upright growth characteristics.
Easy Peasy is a new cultivar of peas from Burpee Seeds featuring large pods and upright growth characteristics.

So many cultivars

When evaluating potential cultivars, it's easy to get excited about specific varieties simply based on photos, but be sure to carefully review the characteristics of specific cultivars before making a decision about which ones to select this year. Make sure that the characteristics of cultivars you select match your needs and the objectives you have for that specific crop in your garden.

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Consider choosing more than one cultivar to extend the growing season or the period of harvest for specific crops since the days to harvest can differ greatly for different cultivars of the same crop.

Tiger Eye sunflower is a new cultivar from Burpee Seeds.
Tiger Eye sunflower is a new cultivar from Burpee Seeds.


Using leftovers

Many times gardeners get excited when planning the garden and ordering seeds and end up with unused seeds at the end of the growing season. While most seeds are viable for a few years if they are stored in a cool, dry location, germination rates are typically reduced when using seeds from the previous season.

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Germination rates for seeds more than a year or two old tend to greatly decrease, especially for crops such as corn and peppers, so refrain from ordering more seeds than you can use in one season.

When using seeds from the previous season, plan to increase the seeding rate to compensate for reduced germination rates.

Mark your calendar

Once your seeds arrive, be sure to keep them in a cool, dark, dry location until you are ready to plant them. The produce drawer in the refrigerator can be a perfect place to store seeds, especially those saved from one year to the next.

If you plan to start some seeds indoors this winter, get out the calendar and read the seed packets to determine when to start sowing seeds indoors.

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For many gardeners, this truly is the most wonderful time of the year. The time when we dream about and plan for having our best garden ever.

Mike Hogan is an associate professor at Ohio State University and an educator at the OSU Extension.

hogan.1@ osu.edu

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus gardeners eager for planting season can start planning now