I need to do better in reseeding my veggies. How do you rememberreseed everything? Is there a day of the month that you take inventory or something?
to
The first thing, of course, was many, many years ago breaking from the mindset of "putting out" a garden.
Now, to comment on your actual question. Replanting by dates never seemed to work out. Rather we keep a weather eye out for the signs that it's time to replant.
Some examples:
Green scallion arlic grown from the cheapie Chinese bulbs from the mart is best before the leaves harden off. When one garlic plot is about 4" high and just begins to change from chartreuse to blue-green, it is time to plant the next one.
Loose leaf and semi-heading lettuce is invariably grown here by transplants. When the seedlings are about 1 1/2" high, they are transplanted to the final bed and then another plot of seedlings is started.
When climbing peas set on their first blossom, more peas are planted 6" away so that as the first peas begin to fade, the next crop is climbing right over top of the old vines and blooming.
Almost all the tomatoes here are OP and indeterminate. When the plant sets on suckers, those are snapped off and put into pots or else put right into the ground in a new tomato plot. When the old vines show signs of exhaustion, they are grubbed up at about the time
the new ones are fruiting. Sometimes I will be harvesting tomatoes from the fourth generation of suckers by late fall.
Cucumbers produce a good flush of high quality cukes and then go senile and the fruits become smaller, bitter, and oddly shaped. We only keep 8 or so bush cucumber vines going at any one time. The first are here in the window waiting a few more weeks until the ground warms more. As soon as they are transplanted, more will be started. As soon as the second are ready to transplant, the first will be fruiting and a third wave is seeded.
While most of the potatoes are just eaten first as new potatoes, the mature potatoes, then cured and stored potatoes ... we also put out a
few potatoes in June, July, and August so we can have the small, sweet new potatoes all along the summer.
For some crops there is no profit in managing them this way. Peppers and eggplants, for example, just keep producing until frost unabated so there's no point in planting them more than once.
Radishes, turnips, beets, are sown directly where they grow for the
second and third (and more) crops.
folding the two middle fingers over it.
use a special small hoe I've made (you can make one out of an egg turner you get and the "Everything's a Dollar" store) and cultivate
between the emerging plants once before they are big enough to mulch heavily or before the leaves take care of that.
Lettuce, chard, and all the brassica including oriental greens, onions and all such as leeks, are planted in short straight rows in
the seedbed close together. When they are 1 1/2" to 2" tall, I loosen the soil and transplant them. Creek sand or sterile peat is
very good for such beds because it forces a lot of root growth and
the soil comes away without damaging any of the roots.
Cucumbers, summer squash, and melons are started in pots and tansplanted when they are 4" tall or bigger.
The sweet corn is grown in the Center of the Universe garden and not in the corn field (obviously).
With shell peas I've been broadcasting the seeds so they land every
3" or so then covering them over with two or three inches of mulch
(usually horse stall litter). I've still got peas in the freezer from last year doing this and we eat a lot of peas. I get two and maybe a skimpy third picking from them then hoe them in and plant something else with another pea patch coming on behind them.
I may replant pole beans once. Most of the time if you strip the old ratty leaves compeltely off the declining vine, it will leave out again and make a whole new crop of both leaves and beans. But we grow so much hard corn and have pole beans in most of it that there is plenty no matter what we do. Whole dried pole bean plants,
pods, leaves, stems and all, make excellent winter chicken and rabbit food.
Half-runner beans (including black turtle beans, red habenas, and pinto beans which are all half-runners) are gown much as climbing peas. They are grown on a fence or trellis and when the vine gives
up on the lower leaves (the beans having been harvested), yellows them and begins dropping them off, more beans are planted parallel to them 6" away. By the time the first bean is calling it quits and bidding fair to die altogether, the second one is crawling up the haulm and setting on more beans.
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