I recently ordered my seeds for this year and I would encourage you home gardeners out there to consider doing the same. I am sure some of you will pick up your seeds from the Home Depot rack or your local garden supply store. There is obviously nothing wrong with this but you limit yourself in many ways.

First, there are more than 6000 varieties of vegetables out there that I know of. Many are not commercially for sale but the point is that it is fun to grow different kinds each year instead of always getting “Snow Crown” cauliflower or “Celebrity” tomato. These stores stock the seeds you know, not the ones that are best. That brings me to my next point.

Success in growing starts with a good seed. Ordering from seed companies allow you to choose seeds that have higher yields, more disease resistance and almost always have higher germination rates because that is what they do and they stake their reputations on getting you good seeds.

Last, it so much more fun to peruse through seeds catalog or online sites deciding which ones sound or look best and then assembling your garden with lots to compare with. It is like buying a house or hiring an employee, you want to compare and contrast before you decide on your final pick. In the same manner, I think it is better to look around before you buy when it comes to seeds.

I will point out that you probably can get your seeds cheaper off the rack at Walmart, but the extra .79 cents won’t matter when you could have had 10 lbs more of tomatoes by getting the right variety.

I have a list of retail garden seed companies below. It is not all inclusive, but it a pretty good list. You will see some of my recommendations in other posts. It is listed alphabetically. Some are better than others, but I will let you decide. Let me know who I am missing in your comments.

Hope this helps.

We just added a new cool tool to VegeNag.com. It is a plant date finder that predicts the BEST outdoor planting date for your area. It is called BEST because it doesn’t just tell you an appropriate range or the date that the plant won’t die. It finds the date that is Beneficial in that the plant will get the optimal conditions during growth. It is the Earliest date for the year so that you won’t have to wait. It is the Safest date so that the plant is the least likely to die. Finally the Timing is analyzed so that the plant will mature during weather that is most favorable for a successful harvest.

There is really no other tool quite like it. We use a complex algorithm to come up with the date. While other plant date finders may still give you an acceptable time to plant, I choose to plant on the best date so that I have the best chances for success. For example, I looked up planting tomatoes in San Diego, California (92126) in two different plant date finders. One suggested that I plant tomatoes in December and the other Jan 4th-18th. Since San Diego rarely sees a frost my tomato plant will probably live and grow slowly. After about 70-80 days I might even get some tomatoes. However, if you talk to any master gardener or refer to the master gardening handbook for California, you would know that you should plant tomatoes in May or June. Tomatoes love the heat and thrive under those conditions, so ideally I should plant tomatoes so that they grow when it is hot.

These planting date finders, like most, obviously look to frost free dates to help a gardener decide when to plant outside. While these dates are important, they only help you to know when to plant so your vegetable won’t die. That is why we developed this new BEST planting date finder. It predicts a date so that plant will not only stay alive, but thrive. If you look up tomatoes for 92126 in our BEST planting date finder it predicts June 1st as the BEST planting date. Here is the screen shot.

Hopefully this tool will help you figure out your planting dates for the coming year and help you be successful in growing tasty vegetables. Please remember that these are plant outdoors dates. Therefore, if you want to get a jump and start seeds indoors you will have to start them to be ready to set out on the BEST planting date. For those addtional dates go to vegenag.com and signup for a free account.

As we continue to develop features for VegeNag.com, we have finally completed the planting guide. This guide will display key planting information for each different vegetable based on your area. For example, here is a screen shot of my planting guide (zip code 84660) for the vegetable Cabbage.

1 of 2, click to enlarge

Notice that the user’s frost free date is automatically displayed. This way, the user doesn’t have to figure out what their frost free date is, VegeNag displays it for them from the National Weather Service data for the respective zip code.

The best part, in my opinion, is farther down the page on the planting guide.

2 of 2, click to enlarge

All these “Key Planting Dates” are dynamically inserted based on the users location. No need to go figure this information out anymore. Better yet, it calculates it based on the specific plant, therefore, when you select something other than cabbage, in this case, you will get different dates.

I can’t tell you how excited I am for this new feature. I think it will help a ton of people. Click here to sign up for a free account.

So what do you think?

Wanted to let you all know that after a couple of years, we have finally launched the VegeNag website. VegeNag is a service that will email you everytime you are supposed to do something for your vegetables in the garden. All you have to do is tell us where you live and what you are planting and we do the rest. You will get reminders for appropriate planting dates, watering schedules, fertilization dates and requirements etc. We also give you a customized planting guide. It is all free right now since the site is still in beta (means that some stuff still is being fixed). Please let me know what you think and tell me about any suggestions you have for improvement. I hope this helps everyone be successful every year. Please signup today.

Send suggestions and emails to alex at vegenag.com

Here is a link to the site VegeNag.com

Here in Utah we have a great gardening show every Saturday morning with Larry Sagers, a brilliant man. I benefit so much from this show. I thought I should let everyone else know that you can listen to the shows via podcast for free. Even if you don’t live in Utah you will benefit greatly from listening to him diagnose problems over the radio.

Anyway, go to the show page to find out more or just go to itunes, under the podcast section do a search for KSL greenhouse and you will find it.

I have been receiving most of my seed catalogs over the past few weeks and I received one I have never seen. I went to their website last year after a friend told me about them and requested a catalog. The company is PineTree Garden Seeds.

The reason why I like their catalog so much is because I felt like they had a lot of varieties that other catalogs do not. Many of the mainstream catalogs all seem to carry the same stuff with little deviation. This one filled in a gap I was looking for with special varieties. For example, I have been looking for a really early broccoli and cauliflower to grow in the spring since we have such a short spring crop season here. This one provided me with varieties for both that are about 10 days earlier than ones I could find in other catalogs. I also found a number of banana pepper options, most others give you one.

I also found really good prices. For example, I want to grow a mild or sweet jalapeno this year since I love the taste, but not the hot. They have a variety called Fooled You Pepper for $1.65 a packet. Stokes also came out this year with a sweet jalapeno called Dulce, yet it costs $5.75 a packet. As you can see, they are a great option.

I have updated my seed catalog post from last year so that you have a good list to choose from. If you are new to vegetable gardening, then you should click the link and order all the catalogs you want. Even if you aren’t new, you may find one that serves you much I like I found PineTree Garden seeds.

There is a wonderful free service that Utah State Extention provides for those growing anything in their yard. It is the Plant Pest Advisories. You can subscribe to these advisories so that you will receive an email every week to alert you what you should be looking for in terms of pests and how to fix the problem before it overtakes your plants.

They give advisories on lawn, fruit trees, vegetables, fruits and ornamental plants. I would advise signing up for this free service for anyone that spends any time or money trying to grow plants.

Plant pest advisory link

I find this highly informative, useful and critical. I hope you will too.

In a prior post I discussed very basic pest and disease practices to control your unwanted plant killers. In order to be effective while being environmentally friendly, most states use an integrated pest management (IPM) program. These are highly informative and very useful. You can even subscribe to the advisories so that you can be alerted to when certain pests are appearing and when to try and control them.

Utah has a great website for this. www.utahpests.usu.edu

I have throughly read the Home Orchard Pest Management Guide since we have 8 fruit trees in our yard. Fruit trees are the highest maintenance producer in your yard so it is very important to read and follow this resource if you have fruit trees. It may seem overwhelming, but this guide actually makes it pretty easy to understand since there are great pictures to describe stages of growth, pest and disease types.

Now is the time to learn because the best time to manage pests is now before the problems can begin. Hopefully you read my post on dormant sprays since you should have already done that for some trees and should be doing it now for others.

I have taken the time to accumulate all of the links for each vegetable that the USU vegetable specialists have published fact sheets on. This information is invaluable because it is specific to Utah and tells you exactly what to do for each vegetable that you may be growing. I have posted a new page on the blog that has all of the links. Look up to the top of this site to see the page Vegetable Fact Sheets for Utah or click the link.

I know that I refer to these all of the time. I have even printed each sheet and put them in a binder. Well worth it in my opinion.

It is about time to where you can begin planting some vegetables. Therefore, it believe it is relevant to post some things about planting vegetables.

First, what types of vegetables can you plant.

In Utah, like in many areas, you can get away with three different gardens, depending on where you live. A spring garden, a summer garden and a fall garden. Some areas of Utah have a much shorter season than others so you must apply these basic principles to your individual circumstances. That being said…

Spring garden- You want to plant vegetables that don’t mind occasional frosty temperatures, some snowfall and cooler temperatures.

• Peas
• Carrots
• Radishes
• Spinach
• Lettuce
• Onions
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Swiss Chard
• Beets
• And more

The time to plant these vary with the weather, but you can plant them as soon as you can work the soil. You also need the soil to be warm enough around 40 degrees to get the seeds up. In my area, I can sometimes plant 1st of March, but this can be too early. Generally, mid March is the earliest. April 15th is probably the day that most should shoot for with these vegetables, earlier if sowing seeds directly into the garden. Even better than this is to plant the seeds indoors and then transplant them when it is an ideal time or buy starts from the nursery. Regardless, there are some seeds that aren’t ideal for transplanting like root crops (carrots, beets, radishes). Onions, broccoli, cauliflower, leaf lettuce, spinach, swiss chard are all good ones to start inside.

In fact, if you don’t get them in early enough then you won’t really get a crop for your Spring garden. A good example is broccoli and cauliflower. You really take a chance in the spring garden with these because if it gets too hot too early then they will bolt and go to seed and no longer head. This is also true of head lettuce which is hard to do in the Spring garden.

Summer garden- These crops need the heat, long days, and can’t take a frost. With these crops you need to be sure you plant them after your frost free date. I have provided the link to Utah frost free dates. Here are the frost free dates if you live outside Utah.

• Beans
• Corn
• Melons
• Cucumbers
• Squash
• Peppers
• Tomatoes
• Pumpkins
• And more

Generally, May 15th is when I plant these summer crops, sometimes I will plant under hotcaps earlier, in order to get a better jump on the season. You will want space reserved for these crops since your Spring garden crops won’t be harvest yet. You will also have these crops into the Fall so that is why you plant your Fall garden where your Spring garden was located except maybe for onions which will need most of the year to mature.

Fall Garden- This is a good time in Utah to get all those Spring vegetables that don’t do well in the Spring, like the ones I mentioned above. In fact, usually your Fall garden will be much more productive than your Spring garden. In the Fall, you can plant all those listed (direct seed or starts) under the Spring garden. Just remember that you must start head lettuce indoors or buy starts since head lettuce will not germinate when temperatures are over 80 degrees.

You will start to plant some of your fall garden around July 1st depending on the vegetable. Fast maturing vegetables like radishes or early varieties of any vegetable will need to wait so that they don’t mature when it is too hot. The way to know is to determine your first frost date of the Fall and then work backward to make sure that the plant will mature before then. If you have a 65 day carrot and your first frost generally happens Oct 15th then you would want to plant around the first of August. Most of these fall vegetables can take mild frosts, but plan it so that you don’t cut it too close.

Remember, to plan your garden to keep these crops segregated so that retilling for your Fall garden in July won’t ruin your summer crop and so forth.

Here is a great link for planting guides and dates when to plant

Utah varieties and planting guide